206 Prof. A. E. Verrill on the Mollusca aequoreum" may refer to the gregarious habits of that fish; " mitis Bala3na" is equally applicable to the mild and in-offensive sturgeon, while the " agmina defensa corporis " seem to allude to the bony plates on that fish's body. There are, it is true, other classical designations for the sturgeon more generally used, such as acipenser and helops ; but in this passage of Ausonius, silurus certainly stands for that fish. Whether sturgeons are now found in the Moselle I am unable to say. The flesh of the silurus formed part of the ancient pharma-copoeia. Dioscorides (Mat. Med. ii. 29) says that in a fresh state it is nourisliing and good for the bowels ; but when salted it has no nutriment, though it is good for clearing the bronchial tubes and for the voice ; used as a poultice it draws out thorns, while the brine from it is good in early stages of dysentery. XXIII. — Bemarhs on certain Errors in Mr. Jeffreys' s Article on '"''The Mollusca of Europe compared loitli those of Eastern North Americay By A. E. Verrill, Professor of Zoology in Yale College, New Haven, Conn., U. S. A. In the October number of the 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History' Mr. Jeffreys published an article upon this interesting subject, in which many important errors occur, due, no doubt, to the fact that the distinguished author is much less familiar with American than with European shells. But as the dredgiugs in connexion with the investigations of our fisheries by the U. S. Fish Commission were under my superintendence during the two past seasons, and Mr. Jeffreys alludes to the fact (tliough rather indefinitely) that he, by invitation of Pro-fessor Baird, accompanied us on several dredging-excursions in 1871, it seems necessary that I should point out some of the more important of these errors, lest it be supposed by some that the same views are held by me. It is not my intention to discuss at this time the numerical results presented by Mr. Jeffreys ; but I would remind the readers of his article that the regions compared are in no respect similar or parallel, and that it is scarcely fair to compare the shells from the entire coast of Europe with those from about 200 miles of the coast of New England, where the marine climate is for tlie most part more arctic than that of the extreme north of Scotland — and, moreover, that the last edition of Gould's 'â– Invertebrata of Massachusetts ' contains only a part of the species added to our fauna since the first edition was published in 1841, and very little of the great mass of facts
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