172 THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 



get away from beaten tracks, and granted fine weather and the 

 right season — we were evidently a little too early — it must be a 

 good collecting ground. As with the Keppels in Marysville, SO' 

 with the Shaws at the Yarra Track, the traveller will find himself 

 in excellent hands so far as catering and his general comfort is 

 concerned. 



29TH November. — We were sorry to leave, but were anxious 

 to get back to the Scandinavians', some eleven miles nearer 

 to Marysville and to collect in that part. Two of us are up 

 early (4 a.m.), and out collecting. One of the most notable 

 points is the great quantity of planarians under the logs, all r 

 or very nearly all, being of the dark varieties. The specimens 

 of G. alba found were remarkably dark in colour— orange and 

 grey — and it would appear as if the centre of distribution of 

 G. spenceri, dendyi, and frosti must lie in this hill country. The 

 yellow-coloured species so common elsewhere, as at Macedon and 

 parts of Gippsland, were here almost entirely absent, only two 

 single specimens being found east of Marysville, despite con- 

 tinuous searchings under logs and the bark of very many trees. 

 They feed on various forms of arthropods — crustaceans, insects, 

 and myriapods — which live with them under the logs and bark, 

 and the numerous empty cases of these testify to their voracity. 

 So voracious are they that our scarabee conceived a strong 

 antipathy to what, lacking in true vermian sympathies, he called 

 " those sticky beasts." It is interesting to watch their method of 

 capturing a strong insect like a beetle, which one would have 

 thought would have been too much for them. One, whilst we 

 were watching, inadvertently walked over the worm's body ; at 

 once it stuck to the slime which the beast puts out and in a 

 comparatively short time, despite its wriggles, the planarian 

 coiled its soft body round the beetle, whose legs and biting parts 

 were glued together and then inserting its muscular proboscis 

 which is put out from the middle of the under surface into one of 

 the soft-jointed parts of the beetle, it fed at leisure. Probably the 

 planarian has enemies which feed upon it, but at present we do 

 not know who these are, for it does not seem that birds will touch 

 them ; at any rate, when Dr. Dendy, elsewhere, tried to feed hens 

 with them they declined to have anything to do with the 

 planarians. The sticky secretion which covers their body is at 

 once annoying to the palate of an animal like a bird, and serves 

 to glue together the mandibles of any creature like a beetle or 

 scolopendra which attempts to bite them. Most of them live in 

 dark places but some crawl out into the open ; those which do the 

 latter, so far as we have seen, are the bright yellow ones which 

 are so attractively coloured that if relished by birds they would be 

 snapped up at once. Possibly this may come under the head of 

 "warning colours." 



