104 KEW : NOTES ON ARION ATER AND OTHER SLUGS. 



variation ; some few are slightly paler than the rest, and occasionally 

 one may be seen with a yellow foot-fringe. 



Near Wood Green, Middlesex, about midday, in September, a 

 red specimen, not quite full grown, was seen crawling upon a path 

 with the sun brightly shining upon it.* 



By the Muswell Hill Road, Highgate, I have noted this species 

 feeding, at night, on cabbage-leaves, and on a leaf of elder, which 

 happened to be lying on the ground. 



An adult of the v. brunnea was kept in captivity, as mentioned 

 above, from May to October, during which time twenty-six substances 

 were eaten, and one, namely, damp paper, was refused. A specimen 

 of the v. rufa !, however, taken in a wood in Lincolnshire, when turned 

 out upon a. newspaper, after two days' confinement without food, 

 commenced at once to eat the paper, making a number of small 

 holes as it crawled along. The dead bodies of Arion subfuscus, 

 A. hortensis, Limax maximus, L.flavus. and L. agrestis, a dead Unto,'] 

 freshly-turned pupse of Adimonia tanaceti, a small part of the abdomen 

 of a dragon-fly (Diplax striolatd), leaves of lettuce, Scabiosa succisa, 

 and Solatium nigrum, flowers of Reticularis sylvatica, Ranunculus 

 flammula, R. acris, R. repens, and R. bulbosus, and the lichens 

 Evernia prunastri and Ramalina farinacea were readily fed upon. 

 Polypodium vulgare, sea-holly (Eryngiuni maritinium), and berries of 

 Arum maculatum were taken in small quantities, and with evident 

 reluctance, as also was Pears' soap. On one occasion an apple was 

 given to the slug, into which it made two small holes, and by means 

 of these in the course of five days it scooped out about a third of the 

 substance of the fruit. The hispid nature of Picris echioides did not 

 serve as a protection against the slug. Part of a freshly-gathered 

 plant was given to it in September, and beginning where a small part 

 of the epidermis had been torn away, it ate freely of the stem, and 



* In a brick-field at Donington-on-Bain, in April 1886, two adults of 

 Arion ater were seen crawling in the sunshine. 



+ There is a widely spread popular impression that slugs feed exclusively on 

 vegetable substances. That this is not the fact has, of course, long been well 

 known. Lister, in his ' Historic Animalium Anglire,' 1678, mentions having 

 seen Limax agrestis feasting on the viscera of a beetle, and since the time of 

 Lister many observers have published notes on the promiscuous feeding of these 

 creatures, Arion ater being noted as feeding upon a dead mouse, beef, the dead 

 bodies of snails and slugs, earth-worms, poisonous fungi, etc., etc., and it has also 

 been known to swallow inorganic matter, presumably for the sake of the fragments 

 of organic substances obtainable with it. A specimen devoured sand, just taken 

 from the beach, which contained fragments of animal matter rendering it luminous 

 when trodden on in the dark, until its feces were composed of pure sand, united 

 together by a little mucus. See note by Dr. Gray, Ann. of Nat. Hist., 1839. 



Naturalist, 



