I905-] 



Slugs and Snails. 



599 



greenhouses, stripping everything within reach. It is one of 

 the largest slugs, often reaching seven inches in length. It is 

 very variable in colour, sometimes black, or yellowish-grey 

 mottled with black and white ; the body is covered with tubercles, 

 and the flat foot is edged with white. It is not a prolific species. 

 The eggs are large and laid in little clusters, and are slightly 

 attached together with slime. They have been found under 

 logs and sacks and in the loose earth on marrow-beds both in 

 late summer and in autumn. In four weeks, young slugs come 

 from them and soon commence to feed. This large slug, which 

 lives for several years, excretes a quantity of opaque white 

 slime which becomes very iridescent when dry. This species 

 also feeds upon animal matter ; specimens have frequently been 

 seen to feed off raw beef*; they also devour one another and 

 one another's slime,t and they have also been found feeding 

 upon fungi growing on rotten wooden seedling boxes in 

 gardens. 



(3). The Household Slug {Limaxflavus. Linn.). 



This is the slug commonly met with in cellars, sculleries, &c, 

 in houses, and it also occurs in damp woods and gardens. It 

 can travel great distances : one was observed to crawl up 

 twenty feet of wall in the night and enter a room, where it left 

 behind a trail of slime thirty feet long on the carpet, and was 

 found in the morning still crawling up to a window. It feeds 

 upon a great variety of substances, especially meal and flour. 

 It is particularly partial to cream, and may also be found feed- 

 ing on the fungi that grow on beer drippings in cellars. Wine 

 corks are often eaten by it. Bread, cooked vegetables, and 

 meat are also attacked. In colour it is dull yellowish, sometimes 

 speckled with white and black, and covered with coarse oval 

 tubercles ; the head and tentacles are bluish ; thd foot is 

 margined with yellowish-white, and the sole milk-white. In 

 length it may reach four inches. The slime is very copious, 

 yellowish in colour, and iridescent, staining objects over which 

 it crawls yellow. It is almost exclusively nocturnal, and may 

 be met with in most parts of Britain. 



* The Zoologist, XIX., p. 7,819. 

 f The. Naturalist, p. 55, 1889. 



