102 
RECORDS OE THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM. 
and Tasmanian types of Orthoptera and Coleoptera* suggests 
that the alpine fauna of Mt. Kosciusko is primarily or specifically 
Tasmanian and secondarily or generically Antarctic. This 
generalisation accords perfectly with the mollusca I am about to 
discuss. The Tasmanian colony left stranded on the Kosciusko 
heights demands a former cold period to explain their existence 
there as clearly as does a moraine left by a vanished glacier. Had 
not geologists furnished evidence of an Australian Glacier Epoch, 
then biologists would have had to invent on their own account a 
theory of such. 
As the molluscan collection has not reached me whole, these 
observations make no pretence to exhaust the subject, the interest 
attending which justifies the publication of data, however 
fragmentary. On the return of Mr. Helms from his first trip to 
Mt. Kosciusko, a single species of his molluscan captures was at 
once entrusted to me, though not then engaged in the Museum 
service, for description. This was an unfigured species, then 
only recorded as Tasmanian, which I identified,! with some 
hesitation from insufficent data as Cystopelta peUerdi , Tate. 
These doubts were dispelled J afterwards by an examination of 
living specimens in their type locality. Since then, this species 
has been traced in Victoria to Ballaarat (Musson), and Loch, 
(Frost) ; in New South Wales to the Kurrajong Hills (Musson), 
Mount Wilson (J. 0. Cox), and Blackheath (Quaife). 
On resuming the examination of the Kosciusko mollusca five 
years afterwards two new species first claimed my attention. 
Edodonta nivea, n. sp. 
(Plate XXIII., Figs. 5, 6, and 7). 
Shell, white, thin, small, shining, flattened, involute, and 
perforate. Whorls, three, closely coiled, the earlier enrolled 
within the latter and almost concealed by them. Spire, a shallow 
crater, one third of the shell’s major diameter, from the lloor of 
which the whorls centrifugally ascend. Umbilicus, narrow, one 
eighth of the shell’s major diameter, a hollow screw showing the 
revolutions of two whorls. Sculpture, last whorl perpendicularly 
crossed by 115 sharp costa diminishing in size and approaching 
one another at the suture and umbilicus ; on the vertex and 
base the interstices, from three to five times the breadth of the 
intervening costa 1 , are crossed by minute spiral raised hair lines 
forming meshes which are in turn crossed by three or four most 
minute longitudinal threads j in the peripheral zone the spiral 
* Op. tit,, iv., p. 398. 
f Proc. Linn. Soe. N.S.W., (2) v., pp. 44-46, pi. i. 
J Op. tit., vi., p. 24. 
