Pvn H,i I'UitlS

124 mytilidjE.
localities given by Linne, on the authority of his pupil
Zoega, is Iceland (where M. marmorata has not since
been found), it may be on the whole better to confine
the specific name of discors to the other species.
Leach
was, I believe, the first to call in question the identity
of M. marmorata with the Mytilus discors of Linne.
In his monograph of the genus Modiola, published in
i
the 'Zoological Miscellany (vol. ii. p. 56), he says, as
to the species in one section,
"
Montagu described two
as natives of Great Britain : one he named M.
species
discors (but I am by no means satisfied that it is the
discors of Linne) ; the other, which is a very distinct
species, discrepans" The change of name afterwards
Forbes was not effected without much
proposed by
opposition. Philippi called it Poliana, in the Supple-
plement to his work on the Sicilian Mollusca,
'
Zeitschrift fiir Malakozoologie '
in the
for June 1844 ; Hanley
substituted another name (tumida), in his Appendix to
Wood's '
Index Testaceologicus '; and D'Orbigny after-
wards added a fourth, viz. Europcea. Lamarck had
described it in 1819 as Modiola discrepans. If the
Linnean collection of shells had been preserved intact,
instead of being so often and so carelessly disarranged and
rearranged by Sir James Smith's pupils
and various
other persons, it might have helped to explain some of
the short and doubtful descriptions contained in the
'
Systema
Naturse '
and other works of the great Cory-
phaeus of northern naturalists, and would have prevented
much of the confusion which has prevailed with
regard to the species above alluded to. Even the numbers
marked on some of the specimens, with reference
to those works, cannot be identified with the handwriting
of Linne ; and it is extremely rare to find a case where
the name has been so inscribed.