LINCOLNSHIRE RAMBLE 



IN SEARCH OF CLAUS/LIA ROLPHII. 



C. S. CARTER, 



Honorary Curator of the Museum of the Louth Antiquarian and Naturalists' Society, 

 Louth, Lincolnshire. 



At the end of April 1901 Mr. J. W. Taylor, F.L.S., and Mr. W. 

 Denison Roebuck, F.L.S. , joined some of their Lincolnshire 

 fellow-workers— the Rev. E. A. Woodruffe Peacock, F.L.S., 

 F.G.S., and Mr. F. M. Burton, F.L.S. , F.G.S. — in making- 

 investigations in the neighbourhood of Gainsborough. Thence 

 they proceeded to Louth, where I had the pleasure of meeting 

 them in company with Mr. H. Wallis Kew, F.Z.S., who was 

 also visiting the county ; and of submitting to Mr. Taylor a 

 very widely scalariform monstrosity of Helix rotandata which 

 I had previously found in a living state at North Reston, near 

 Louth, 1 and which monstrosity he pronounced to be extremely 

 unusual. 



On the 1 st May we visited several of the delightful woods 

 which flank the wolds southward of Louth, our principal object 

 being to search for Clausilia rolphii, for which Mr. Kew had, 

 in 1887, discovered three habitats in this neighbourhood. This 

 notable mollusc, which was formerly supposed to be restricted 

 in Britain to the South of England, has in this island a very 

 discontinuous and local distribution ; and its discovery in 

 Lincolnshire — far removed from its previously known range — 

 was of considerable interest to conchologists. 2 Indeed, Mr. 

 Roebuck, in his admirable ' Materials towards a List of the Land 

 and Fresh-water Mollusca of Lincolnshire (1887),' stated that the 

 record of this species was the most important and significant 

 fact which his paper contained — important inasmuch as this new 

 locality was so far distant from the very few English counties 

 which the species had hitherto been known to inhabit and much 

 further north than any one of them, and significant as showing 

 the possibilities of a county which had been so little worked as 

 Lincolnshire. 3 The places in which the animal was found arc 



1 C. S. Carter, Helix rotundata m. scalariforme , Science Gossip, 1900, X.S., 

 Vol. 7, p. 96. 



-2 J. W. Taylor, Discovery of Clausilia rolphii in North Lincolnshire, 

 Journal of Conchology, 1887, Vol. 5, p. 220. 



3 W. Denison Roebuck, -Materials towards a List of the Land and Fresh- 

 water Mollusca of Lincolnshire, Naturalist, 1887, pp. 245-277. 



1902 July 1 . P 



