25 



NOTES ON THE GENUS HARPA. 

 By JA?*IES COSMO ^lELYILL, M.A., D.Sc. 



(Read before the Society, loth March, 1915). 



Of all the genera of mollusca, few if any possess a more isolated 

 'facies' than the Harp-shells; and, coupled with this fact, is the 

 extraordinary circumstance that, though very scantily represented 

 specifically, the individual members so frequently run into eacli other 

 that, from the time of Linnaeus, 1767, who only enumerated two, to 

 A. Sutor, in 1896, who admitted no less than sixteen species, a very 

 wide divergence of opinion has persisted amongst all authors and 

 students of the subject. Many of the recent forms are known to all, 

 being of striking appearance, and of beauty hardly to be surpassed. 

 Known by the short spire, much expanded and roundly inflated 

 body-whorl, adorned with regular equidistant longitudinal ribs, these 

 polished and often highly coloured and highly ornamented, of varied 

 thickness, sometimes overlapping and acuminately 1-2 angled below 

 the sutures, the interniediate spaces being decorated with an undu- 

 late pattern in most cases, and varied in body colour, .the interior 

 surface much polished and variegated, conspicuously blotched with 

 brown; columella slightly incrassate, shining; canal short; operculum 

 absent. All, with two exceptions, natives of the Eastern tropics, the 

 two being H. crmata Swainson, from the West American shores, and 

 the recently described H. punctata Verco from South Australia. 



Rumphius, 1705, in pre-Linnean times was the first to signalise the 

 genus under its commonly received name. Bolten, 1798, next utilised 

 it ; and it was finally adopted by Lamarck a year later (1799). 



Other generic terms proposed are as follows : — 

 Cithara^ Klein, 1753. 



Harpalis, Link (Rost. Samml., iii., p. 114), 1807. 

 Harparia Rafinesque (Anal. Nat.), 1815. 

 Lyra Griffith (Cuvier's Anim. King., xii., p. 234), 1834. 



Dr. W. H. Dall'-and Mr. C. Hedley^both consider, on the grounds 

 just stated, that Bolten's authority for the establishment of the genus 

 should be paramount. Hedley likewise would accept Bolten's specific 

 names in several instances. In the forthcoming pages it will be seen 

 that I agree with him in the main, though not in every case. 



Linnaeus, in both ed. x. (1758) and ed. xii. (1767) of his 'Systema 

 Naturae,' included under the collective name of Buccinutn the mem- 



1 Cythara Schum. (Essai, p. 245), 1817, has since been applied to a well known section of 

 Plenrotoiiiidie, type C. citharclla Lamaick (.An. Sans Vert., ix., p. 407). 



2 Dall in fotirn. of Conch., xi., p. 296 (April, 1906). 



3 Hedley in Nautilus, xxv. , p. 65 (October, 191 1). 



