JS'ote on Vivipara lineata^ Val. 297 



Crosse. Here, then, was an additional proof of the erroneous 

 habitat originally given by Valenciennes. 



I should add that the shell found by me labelled as the type 

 of Pahodina lineata in the Garden of Plants answers well to 

 the description of Valenciennes. 



The facts given above remove Paludina lineata from the 

 catalogue of American ViviparidcB. Unfortunately, however, 

 the name lineata remains to burden and confuse our synonymy. 

 Haldeman, surely without critical examination, referred Valen- 

 ciennes' description of Pal. lineata to the North American species 

 described by Say as Paludina mvijjara. Haldeman has been 

 blindly followed by most American authors, and by Kiister, who 

 farther adds to the confusion by a typographical error, using 

 linearis instead of lineata in a single instance, a name which 

 some have tried to perpetuate. 



This confusion would have been avoided by a reference to the 

 original description of Valenciennes, instead of accepting the 

 name from correspondents or books. It is one of the greatest 

 faults of American writers on Conchology thus to accept names, 

 without reference to original descriptions.* Until this fault is 

 corrected, the disgraceful confusion of our synonymy will be worse 

 confounded. 



* An instaDce of the mistakes thus arising is to be found in reference to this 

 very species of Valenciennes. A writer in the Proc. Ac. Nat. Sc, Phila. (1862), 451, 

 notes the fact of a certain species of North American Vivipara being characterized 

 by foicr spiral red bands, and further insists on the permanency (invariability?) of 

 the characteristic as a guide in distinguishing it from an allied European form 

 which has but three bands. Yet this author refers this strictly four-banded species 

 to Paludina Uneala, Valenciennes, a species described not as having four red spiral 

 bands, but as having a large number of bands of a deeper green and variable width, 

 sometimes merely hnear. Surely, if the species invariably has four bands, such a 

 description as the last cannot apply to it. 



2 



