426 American Work in the Department of [June, 
AMERICAN WORK IN THE DEPARTMENT OF RE- 
CENT MOLLUSCA DURING THE YEAR 1879. 
BY WILLIAM H. DALL. 
T has not been practicable for the writer to emulate the Zod/og- 
ical Record in minuteness of detail, however desirable that 
course might have been for some reasons. It is possible that 
some minor papers may have been overlooked from not having 
been sent to the Smithsonian Institution or the writer during the 
year, but it is not likely that anything of importance has escaped 
notice. It was open to the writer to make this article a mere 
catalogue or a review of work done. He has chosen the latter as 
the most useful course, and has freely expressed his opinions in 
regard to the papers enumerated. It is a subject for regret that, 
in America, among those who are interested in Mollusca espe- 
cially, the veterans are passing away and few come to fill their 
places. This is perhaps due to the absence of any satisfactory 
text book, the condition of the nomenclature and the inferior po- 
sition occupied by the groups in most manuals of zodlogy, so far 
as treatment is concerned. We may hope that the laboratories 
of Prof. Alexander Agassiz and of the Johns Hopkins University, 
with the other seaside summer schools, may produce good fruit 
in this direction. There is certainly no department as a whole in 
which more work must be done of all (except merely descriptive) 
kinds, before the science can be put on a satisfactory footing. 
Even under the present adverse circumstances, a creditable 
amount of good work has been done in several directions, and 
we may reasonably expect that succeeding years will be hardly 
less fruitful. The harvest truly is plenteous but the laborers 
are few. 
General Works on Mollusca.—But one publication which can 
claim to be of this nature has appeared in America in 1879. This 
is a “Manual of Conchology, structural and systematic, with 
illustrations of the species,’ by Geo. W. Tryon, Jr.; 8vo, Phila- 
delphia, the author, 1879, e¢ seg. Of this, three parts of Vol. 1, 
Cephalopoda, have come to hand, and include 192 pages of text 
and seventy plates. The scope of the work is thus stated by the 
author: It is to be a “Conchological manual, which, while 
more comprehensive than any similar work hitherto published, 
shall be so condensed in text and illustration, that it may be issued 
at a much more moderate price. It will include, in systematic 
