H.VETE — ON CERTAIN MOVEMENTS OF THE LIUACIDJ2. 183 



whitey-brown, or yellowish-grey one (Limax arhorum). Its movements 

 are more active than any others, and the result of several experiments 

 has convinced me that the power of ascending in the way I have de- 

 scribed is not an accidental one, but quite a normal characteristic of the 

 animal. The regularity of the motion in ascending, and the facility 

 with which it regains its footing upon the branch when it gets to the 

 end of the thread, seem to show this. I have had as many as four sus- 

 pended from a forked branch at the same time, three of which returned 

 a distance of five inches, and one two inches, and all reached the branch, 

 and crept along it again. They are very apt to return shortly after they 

 have commenced to descend, which, as I have said, accounts perhaps for 

 so few of them having been observed when suspended. 



To perform the experiment of getting the slugs to do this, they should 

 be collected the clay before, and kept under a glass shade, as the 

 secretion is too thin to form a sufficiently strong thread for their support 

 if they are gorged with food ; and if, when they have descended about 

 five or six inches, a very weak saline solution (not sufficiently strong 

 to injure them) is placed under them, they return upon touching 

 it. 



Mr. Archer mentioned that he had referred to the older writings in the 

 " Linnean Transactions," and to Mr. Clarke's papers in the " Annals of 

 Natural History," with a view to see what had been recorded in regard 

 to this faculty of the slugs. He had found that there was no record of 

 their power to reascend by means of the mucous thread, and he there- 

 fore ventured to think that Mr. Harte's note must be considered inte- 

 resting. It was well known that the aquatic snails could descend from 

 the water-plants by an invisible thread, and that one could with the 

 hand raise them by its agency up to, but not beyond, the surface of the 

 water. He did not know if it had been noticed that they possessed the 

 power to reascend the same thread, so as to regain the plant from which 

 they depended. 



Mr. E. Palmer Williams exhibited two birds, very rare as Irish, 

 Ardea comata, the squacco heron, and Botaurus minutus, the little bittern, 

 a male. The squacco heron was shot on a lake at Castlemartyr demesne, 

 at Lord Shannon's, by a young gentleman, named Garde, on October 26, 

 1 860. The little bittern was taken in a bog, one mile from the town of 

 Youghal, whither it was chased by a hawk, and was picked up, dead 

 from fright, by a countryman, September 3, 1860. 



The Chairman said that this very beautiful little heron exhibited to- 

 night by Mr. E. P. Williams, the squacco heron {Ardea comata), is one 

 of the rarest of our visitants, being at the most merely a straggler — in 

 fact, previously to the present example being taken, it has only once 

 fallen under the notice of ornithologists as having occurred in Ireland. 

 Both the specimens were killed near Youghal, the first in May, 1849. 

 The squacco heron has been taken in at least ten English counties, the 

 most northerly being Cumberland, but never in Scotland. Its habitat 



2 c 



