280 PEOCEEDINGS OF THE MALA.COLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



ON ARIOFEANTA DAZYI, n. subsp., FROM MYSORE, WITH A NOTE 

 ON MARIJELLA BUSSUMIERI (Val.). 



By W. T. Blanfoed, LL.D., F.E.S., etc. 



Read lOth March, 1899. 



In reply to a letter of mine, asking Mr. W. M. Daly to look for 

 certain snails and slugs, the animals of whicli are unknown or 

 imperfectly known, lie has been so good as to send to me a small 

 collection of land mollusca from the Kadur District, a part of Mysore 

 which has hitherto escaped the notice of malacologists, hut which 

 has recently yielded that most interesting discovery MuUeria Dalyi} 

 Amongst the forms sent was a slug which Lieut.-Col. Godwin- 

 Austen, to whom I forwarded the specimens, identified with Maricella 

 Dussumieri (Val.). This identification tends to confirm Mr. Cockerell's 

 suggestion ^ that the original locality for the slug was not the island 

 of Mahe, in the Seychelles, but the port of the same name, a French 

 possession on the Malabar Coast, only 125 miles south by west from 

 Kadur.' 



Some of the species sent by Mr. Daly appear to me to be undescribed, 

 but the specimens being barely adult, 1 prefer awaiting additional 

 evidence before describing them. One mollusc, however, an Ario- 

 phanta, of which several adult specimens have now reached me, is, 

 I think, worthy of notice. It is evidently allied to the Mlgiri 

 Ariophanta cysis, Bs., being somewhat intermediate in form between 

 that species and the Mahableshwar A. hitumescens, Blf., but it differs 

 in so many characters from both that, although I was acquainted 



Ante, pp. 14, 87. 



Nautilus, xii (1898), p. 9. 



Mr. "Webb, in his paper on Maricella (ante, p. 147), appears to have had- some 

 difficulty in ascertaining where M. Dussumier's collections were made. That 

 the French traveller collected extensively in Malabar there can be no doubt, for 

 some of the most characteristic Malabar vertebrates, e.g., Draco Dussumieri, 

 Dum. et Bib., and Semnopithecus Dussumieri, Is. Geoffr. (= S. hypoleucus, 

 Blyth), both peculiar to the area, were named after hira. A reference to the 

 Mdmoires du Micsee d^ Histoire Naturelle, vol. xv, p. 377 (1827), shows that 

 M. Dussumier, who was a merchant and shipowner of Bordeaux, made several 

 voyages to China, and landed more than once in India, where he appears to 

 liave collected at different times on both coasts, the Coromandel and Malabar. 

 He probably also touched at the Seychelles, and collected there, for amongst 

 various specimens presented by him to the Museum at Paris, some were from 

 those islands. 



That there was once land connection between India and the Seychelles 

 I hold as almost certain, but since the union was probably broken up as long 

 ago as Eocene times, the occurrence of the same species of slug in both is very 

 unlikely. 



