342 PROCEEDINGS OF THE MALACOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



he always calls Troptpvpa) fell off it tumbled into the basket and was 

 caught. 



Pliny the elder (Hist. Nat., ix, 61) saj^s that the Murex was caught 

 in small open-work baskets, in which is placed a bait consisting of 

 half-dead mituli (query Tapes georjrapMcus). These gape when 

 restored to the sea, and when the greedy Murex inserts its 'sting' 

 they revive, close their valves, and imprison the Murex. 



There are similar shell-mounds outside Tarentum, which was a very 

 noted locality for the production of the purple dye. As in the case 

 of Sidon, the mounds are outside the city area, as no doubt the 

 manufacture was not very savoury. Traces of similar works have been 

 noticed in Crete, in Cythera, in Laconia, and, finally, in the Island of 

 Leuce off Crete, by E.. C. Bosanquet, who dates them back to 1600 b.c. 

 (Rep. Brit. Assoc, 1903, p. 817). At Tyre, which I also visited, there 

 are at the foot of the cliff remains of certain narrow oblong chambers 

 lined with very hard cement, which are supposed by some to have 

 been employed in the manufacture of the dye. Canon Tristram ( ' ' Land 

 of Israel,"' ed. 1865, p. 51) saw at Tj-re 'kitchen middens' of Murex., 

 thrown up in the course of excavation. I was not fortunate enough 

 to come across these, and it is remarkable that he notes that they were 

 all of one species, Murex Irandaris, Linn., while there were only a few 

 broken specimens of M. trunculus. My experience at Sidon was 

 exactly the reverse. 



