Abstract
IN noticing a third edition of the late Mr. S. P Woodward's well-known “Manual of the Mollusca,” our object is only to indicate wherein it differs from its predecessors. The body of the work is unaltered; whilst the new editor, Mr. Ralph Tate, in order to bring the work up to the present state of our knowledge, has added an appendix, containing the description of those recent and fossil genera which, either from more recent discovery or oversight, are not to be found in it. This appendix, with its separate index, occupies eighty-five pages, and is illustrated with twenty-seven woodcuts, including drawings of Clydonites costatus, Cochloceras fischeri (Hauer), Eucyclus goniatus (DesL), Nucleospira ventricosa (Hall), &c. Its separate existence we do not object to, on account of the expensive typography of a work of the kind; nevertheless, the outlay involved in an incorporation of the two indexes into a single whole would have been fully made up for by the extra facility of reference afforded, and the diminution in the chance of any additional remarks on previously described genus being overlooked. In the preface to the second edition, which is retained in that under notice, it is remarked that “the chapter on Tunicata has been omitted, since they aie more nearly allied to the Polozoa than to the Mollusca proper, and since the Molluscoidan group would have made the work inconveniently bulky.” Such being the case, we cannot help asking why the Brachiopoda are not also removed. Is it not because they have shells, whilst the Ascidians are deficient in indestructible parts; not, by the way, that Ascidians are Molluscoidan now-a-days. Additional remarks will be found on the nature of Belemniies; that Crioceras must merge into Ancyloceras is shown to be certain; the genera Vermetus and Siliquaria are placed in a family by themselves, at the same time that their differences from the mimetic Serpulidæ are explained. Seversl of the families are re-arranged, at the same time that the newly added genera are introduced. The work with the appendix is as accurate a representation of the state of conchology in 1871 as was the first edition on its publication. We put it thus because we can find no difference between this third edition and the second, which has latterly been been bound up with Mr, Tate's appendix in exactly the same form as it appears in the newly produced work.
A Manual of the Mollusca.
S. P.
Woodward
By. Third Edition. (London: Lockwood and Co., 1875.)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 12, 494 (1875). https://doi.org/10.1038/012494a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/012494a0