Pvn H,i I'UitlS

194 KELLIID.E.
that the shell gapes. It can be completely closed on all
sides at the will of the animal. A species (L. loripes),
half an inch long, found on the coast of Florida has
a singular habitat. According to Mr, Stimpson, the
discoverer, " it lives in sand or mud, on the flats, near
low-water mark, at the depth of a foot below the surface,
and generally occupies the holes of marine worais and
fossorial Crustacea."" This might warrant a supposition
that the animal of Lepton is predacious.
Three species of Lepton are enumerated in Dr. Philip
list of mollusca from the west coast of
Carpenter's
North America. The genus Scintilla of Deshayes ap-
pears to be closely allied to the present genus.
A. Shell pit-marked.
1. Lepton squamosum *, Montagu.
Solen sqvarao&is, Mont. Test. Brit. i. p. 565. L. squamosum, ~F. & H. ii.
p. 98. pi. xxxvi. f. S, 9, and (animal) pi. O. f. 6.
Body clear white : mantle very large, having its margins
flexuous and often puckered into two or three folds ; the
margins extend considerably beyond the shell, and from them
springs, on each side of the ventral range in the middle, a row
of 25 rather long, slender and pointed milk-white tentacular
filaments : the pallial margin has also at its sides 40 long,
strong, close-set, blunt, frosty-white cirri of different lengths,
one of these last filaments being much larger and longer than
the others, and resembling one of the tentacles of a Gastero-
: pod excurrent tube short :
foot bluish-white, and transparent,
with a broad streak of intense snow-white running down the
middle, and a still more conspicuous Hake at the anterior end :
it is fixed to the centre of the body by a moderately long-
pedicle. (Clark.)
Shell roundish-oval, with a tendency to a square outline
in consequence of the front margin being nearly straight and
of the hinge-line being unusually broad ; it is very much
* Scaly.