3 o8 



Kew: Slime -Threads of Planar ian- Worms. 



Our notes on land-planarians relate to three small species : 

 Rhvnchodemus terrestris, R. sylvaticns, and Geodesmns bilineatus ; 

 and to four species of Bipalium : animals of considerable length, 

 possessing- a peculiar anterior extremity, which takes, at full 

 extension, the shape of a grocer's cheese-cutter. 



The first observations known to the writer are those of Sir W. 

 Elliot on Bipalinm lunatum.* The animal (about five inches 

 long) occurs in gardens around Madras, where it crawls among 



decaying vegetation, often raising 

 the anterior extremity and using 

 it as a feeler. When it arrives at 

 the end of a leaf or twig, the 

 observer says, it reaches out in 

 search of a new resting place, 

 trying in all directions with the 

 anterior extremity; and if nothing 

 offers, ' it stretches forward until 

 nearly the whole body is dis- 

 engaged, and it is left at length 

 hanging from the posterior ex- 

 tremity, by means of the viscid 

 secretion, which, on other occa- 

 sions, marks its track, till it has 

 descended to twice or thrice its 

 own length, when the thread 

 attenuates and breaks, ' and the 

 animal falls to the ground.'! 

 (Fig. i). 



Prof. Moseley, unacquainted 

 with Sir W. Elliot's paper, has 

 remarked that the slime of certain 

 land-planarians observed by him 



Bipalinm hinatnm forming- a slime- L * 



thread. After Elliot, Madras Journal of ill Ceylon IS SO .tOUgh that the 

 Literature and Science, XV. (1848). PI. I., an } ma j can suspend itself by a 



thread formed of it ; the plan- 

 arians referred to, Bipalinm diana and B. proserpi?ia, had several 

 times lowered themselves thus from the observer's hand to a 

 table by making a thread 6-7 inches long, i 



* Planaria lunata. 



t Elliot, Madras Journal of Literature and Science, XV. (1848), pp. 162-7. 

 % Moseley, Nature, VI. (1872), pp. 64-5. Moseley recurs to this subject 

 in his celebrated memoir on the 'Land-planarians of Ceylon' (1), where it is 



Naturalist, 



