NOTES ON LIVING NAUTILUS. 
BASHFORD DEAN. 
DuRiNG a recent visit to Manila I learned from Commis- 
sioner Dean C. Worcester that Nautilus, a form which one 
usually associates with remote and cannibal islands, could be 
collected quite readily in the straits between the islands of 
Negros and Cebu. This locality was accessible, and a short 
stay there, I was told, would afford one an opportunity of 
examining this, the only living picture of orthoceratids and 
ammonites, to say nothing of its greater interest as the 
probable key to the puzzles of cephalopod descent. So it 
came about that I visited Negros. Thanks to the kindness 
of Professor Worcester, the trip itself proved a zoólogical 
excursion de luxe, for he secured for me the services of his 
long-time guide, the taxidermist Mateo Francisco, and he put 
us in charge of his good friend, Don José Bocanegra, whose 
large sugar estate is near the town of Bais. It was during this 
trip that the following notes and sketches were outlined. They 
have been allowed to stand practically as jotted down, as first 
impressions, — with my apologies, and a dedication, if they are 
worth one, to the student of Nautilus, my good friend and 
former colleague in Columbia University, Dr. Arthur Willey. 
Nautilus is doubtless common throughout the waters of the 
southern Philippines.! It can, however, be obtained so readily 
in the region of southern Negros that such a station, if only 
because of its accessibility, deserves to become a classic one. 
The reason why a deep-water form like Nautilus can be secured 
with little difficulty here is a simple one: it is a regular 
by-product, so to speak, of the traps of the fishermen. Its 
* I note, in passing, that dead shells of Nautilus occur not uncommonly as fat 
north as Japan. One was picked up a few years ago near the laboratory at 
Misaki (lat. 35? 10’ N.). 
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