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RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF LIMAX TENELLUS AS A 

 BRITISH SPECIES. 



By W. UENISON ROEBUCK, F.L.S. 



(Read before the September Meeting of the Leeds Branch, and before the 

 Society, September 14th, 1904). 



It is a great satisfaction to be able to re-establish a species which has 

 hitherto occupied but a precarious and doubtful place in the list of 

 British mollusca, and I am now in a position to do this in the case of 

 Limax teneUus^ of which a number of living specimens have recently 

 been sent to me for identification by the discoverer, the Rev. Robert 

 Godfrey, of Edinburgh, who finds it is the common slug of the 

 pine-woods of the Forest of Rothiemurchus, in the Vice-county of 

 Easterness. 



Mr. Godfrey had, at my request, been collecting living slugs during 

 the past month or two in various localities in the highlands of Scot- 

 land, with good success, the occasion of his activity in this direction 

 being that we are endeavouring to obtain the various species of 

 Arion from all the counties and vice-counties of the British Islands 

 from which we have not yet seen them, in order that the maps given 

 in the forthcoming part of Mr. J. W. Taylor's Monograph may be 

 the more complete. 



Mr, Godfrey sent me the first two examples on the 27th of August, 

 when I at once saw that he was right in suspecting them to be this 

 species, though the slime was not quite so yellow as he has observed 

 it in Switzerland. These two were immature, the smaller, which was 

 very lively and active, being only about ten mm. long, and the other 

 one, which was referable to the var. fulva, twenty-five mm. in 

 length when crawling, and darkish in colour, the yellow slime not 

 being very evident. I at once congratulated Mr. Godfrey on his 

 success, and asked for more specimens, in order that Mr. Taylor and 

 I might study them in bulk. He sent me about a couple of dozen 

 on the 29th and 30th of August, which were all much lighter in colour 

 than the first two, very yellow, and referable to var. cerea, their waxy- 

 like appearance making the varietal name very appropriate and signifi- 

 cant. The largest specimen measured thirty mm. in length when 

 crawling, twenty mm. when at rest. 



It was satisfactory to learn that the species is the common slug in 

 the pine-forest of Rothiemurchus, although it is somewhat surprising 

 that a species occurring so commonly should have escaped detection 

 by conchologists all these years. Mr. Godfrey describes its chief 

 haunts as being on old pine-branches lying half smothered in the 

 masses of blaeberries, whortleberries, and heather. These branches 



