Speciation of the genus Emmericia (Gastropoda) in the Adriatic area

The genus Emmericia, proposed by Brusina (1870), has attracted much attention from malacologists. Whereas some authors, as for example Brusina in one of his papers (1870), considered that only one species existed in the whole area of the genus, others, on the contrary, for example Bourguignat (1880), drastically went to the other extreme, raising the number of species of this genus even to 67, the ranges of nearly all of which extended to the entire area of the genus. For instance, according to Bourguignat, in the small river of Jadar, near Split, lived about twenty species of Emmericia, whereof the greater number was represented also in the other localities of the Adriatic area. It was a systematics which described the groups of variants of the same species as separate species, without observing the wide intrapopulation variability. No wonder, therefore, that in literature within the genus Emmericia there is now a host of names whose synonymity, since the names were given to the various groups of variants in various localities, it is not possible entirely to establish. Due to this fact, this paper will take into account only those specific names which can be certainly established to be synonyms, i.e. relating to the same populations, but most of names introduced by Bourguignat (1880), as well as by Westerlund (1886), must be omitted and ignored. For this work I used the abundant collection gathered by myself in the territory of Yugoslavia, North Italy and Greece, as well as S. Brusina’s collection in the National Zoological Museum in Zagreb, which, thanks to Director Dr. Canedjija, I had the opportunity of examining.