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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



A Treatise on Zoology. Edited by E. Bay Lankestbr, M.A., 

 LL.D., F.K.S., &c. Part V. Mollusca. By Paul Pel- 

 seneee, D.Sc. Adam and Charles Black. 



The present volume of this series, so indispensable to every 

 student of zoology, will probably attract more readers of this 

 Journal than did its predecessors, for we have now reached in 

 the Mollusca a phylum which has always interested, and often 

 been the study of, very many naturalists. A perusal of these 

 pages may prove to be a revelation to many collectors of shells, 

 and show that pure conchology is merely the husk of molluscan 

 zoology ? or, in the words of Teufelsdrockh, a " Philosophy 

 of Clothes." When we read that descriptive zoologists have 

 enumerated more than 28,000 species of living molluscs, of 

 which more than half are Gastropods, and that fossil represen- 

 tatives of molluscs are found in all deposits from the Palaeozoic 

 onwards, it is evident that here indeed is a field in which a 

 specialist should obtain no uncertain view in the unfolding or 

 evolutionary development of one great division of animal life. 

 Not only of the external characters, but in anatomy and embryo- 

 logy, the reader and student may rely that what is not told is 

 not worth telling ; while what will probably interest the readers 

 of ' The Zoologist ' the more, is a section devoted to bionomics 

 and distribution, which, though small compared with the pre- 

 ceding subjects, is one, particularly as regards bionomics, which 

 the pages of this Journal are mainly intended to promote. And 

 thus we come to the reason why this book should be on all our 

 shelves, not because as general naturalists, and not as more 

 fundamental zoologists — as would we all were — we shall follow 

 every page with the necessary animal dissection, but because we 

 can find a last and reliable statement on those matters which are 

 beyond our purview, and can procure a safe guide and a trusty 

 reference when we go beyond our own standpoint. We are not 



