1108 The American Naturalist. (December, 
January, 1891, the rain made invidious incursions into the hall during 
the night, and in the morning the snail was found onthe carpet. In 
an hour afterward he was as willing as ever to struggle for existence. 
He ate heartily of celery, with his little rasping tongue (radula) beset 
with multitudes of tiny siliceous teeth. 
It was not until February 23, that the other snail had been suf- 
ficiently overcome by the forces of nature to loosen his epigram enough 
to descend to the floor. He was then placed in a shallow saucer of 
water and he assumed his functions as though there had been no state 
of torpor. 
While the house snails were glued to the ceilings, their relatives. in 
a “snailery ” in the garden had been aroused to activity by the first 
rain as it pattered through the screen cover of the snailery, and had 
been busy housekeeping. As the result, a number of tiny pellucid 
looking balls were, on January 21, 1891, carefully hidden. in the moist 
earth in the box., These were the eggs of the snails. Time had been 
lost by the house snails, their siesta, extended beyond the requirements 
of Nature, had gained them nothing. It was the intention to study 
all these forms and see if the “ house snails” lived any longer for their 
protracted æstivation, but, alas! for the rapacity of the animal king- 
dom, slugs, sow bugs, ants and insects from the rosebushes, made war 
upon the whole snail colony, adults, babies and eggs, and by summer 
time, the little houses were empty, the tenants were dead.—Mrs. BUR- 
TON WILLIAMSON. 
A Careless Writer on Amphiuma.—I have recently read an 
article in the last number (October, 1895) of the American Journal of 
Morphology by Mr. Alvin Davison on Amphiuma, which contains such 
evidence of haste and carelessness as to require early notice. At pres- 
ent I refer principally to his references to my work and my conclusions, 
but as the errors here are so numerous I cannot suppose that I am the 
only author favored by misrepresentation, 
On page 378 he says, “ the number of premaxillo-maxillary teeth is 
never less than fifty. The number is wrongly stated by Cope as thirty- 
one.” I have recounted the teeth on the specimen which I had in 
hand when this assertion was written, and I find the number to be ex- 
actly as I have stated. Mr. Davison has probably counted the teeth 
on both sides of the skull. One would think that a little scientific 
imagination would have suggested this explanation of the discrepancy 
to Mr. Davison. 
Our author next describes the squamosal bone of Amphiuma, putting 
his discoveries as to its shape in italics, as though it had not been often 
