INTRODUCTION, XV 
‘he first author to describe British slugs was Dr. Martin Lister, one of 
the celebrated trio who founded the modern scientific study of natural 
history in England, and it is to this able investigator that we owe— 
amongst numerous other things—the first faunal work on British mollusea 
and their earliest anatomical investigation. 
In 1678 he published under the title of “Animalium Anglize ‘'T'res 
Tractatus . . . . Alter de Cochleis tum errestribus tum Fluviatilibus” 
an account of the British land and freshwater mollusea which from a 
scientific point of view will bear comparison with many works published 
even in modern times, and it is to the great glory of Lister that he paid 
careful attention to all aspects of his subject, studying it from every point 
of view. He was a capable anatomist, and published subsequent works 
dealing with the internal structure of our mollusks. 
In this work of 1678 the first three slugs known as British : 
1. Limax maximus, 
2. Agriolimax agrestis, 
3. Arion ater, 
were for the first time described and figured, although the existence of the 
first-named species was indicated twelve years before in Merret’s ‘“ Pinax 
Rerum Naturalium Britannicarun.” 
In 1681 Lister published a supplement to his work, of which supple- 
ment a second edition appeared in 1685, but in this only the red variety 
of the last-named species is brought forward. 
‘The next addition to our list was also by Dr. Lister in 1685 and 1694, 
when, in his “Conchology” and “ Exercitationes Anatomic,” he figured 
and described the anatomy of our fourth species : 
4. Limax flavus. 
The fact that the figure does not bear the letter A, by which Lister was in 
the habit of distinguishing the English species in his general works, may be 
safely disregarded. 
The next faunal work in which the slugs were included was not pub- 
lished for nearly one hundred and fifty years after Lister’s, but in the 
meantime the effect of the Cuvierian impetus to the study of the natural 
sciences at the beginning of the nineteenth century was seen in the 
description as new or the introduction into our lists of four species. 
In 1819 Férussac published his splendid work: Histoire Naturelle 
générale et particulitre des Mollusques Terrestres et Fluviatiles, in which 
he described and cited a British habitat for 
5. Testacella maugei, 
our first recorded shell-slug. 
