Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/548

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THE ZOOLOGIST.

and Magazine of Natural History' for May, 1869[1] that the friend referred to by Mr. Broadwood was Mr. Marlborough Pryor, of Trinity College, Cambridge.

I have been thus careful to give the dates of the various commuuications on the subject which have been published, because there appeared to be some doubt as to whom the credit of rediscovering this annelid in England belonged.

The soil upon which the specimens in question were found is described by Mr. Broadwood as the hardest wealden clay, and though very deep, it is so close that every hole and crack holds water, and it is a long lime before the rain becomes absorbed.

At a meeting of the Croydon Microscopical Club, held on the 16th November, 1870, the President, Mr. Henry Lee, announced his discovery, three weeks previously, of a new locality for Trochetia subviridis,—namely, on the Beddington Sewage-irrigation Farm of the town of Croydon,—and stated that he was informed that it was also to be found on the other irrigation-land belonging to that town at Norwood. He had found it "in about six inches of water at the bottom of the great ditch which conveys the Croydon sewage on to the estate before it flows over the land, and for three weeks it had lived and thriven in a bowl of water with two minnows." Three months after this report,[2] it was still Have and in good condition, having been kept in water all the time in Mr. Woodward's room at the British Museum.

Mr. Henry Lee was informed by another correspondent that he had heard of these leeches in Hants, and one of his own relatives assured him, in 1869, that at Lindfield, in Sussex, about five and twenty years previously, Land Leeches were so abundant in the fields and on the footpaths through them, that the ladies of the family who resided there avoided them in their evening walks.

Mr. Marlborough Pryor has recently been good enough to inform me that in November, 1876, he found a specimen of Trochetia subviridis at Elstree, in Hertfordshire. As in the case of the Sussex specimens, it was found upon a stiff clay soil.

In conclusion, I may state that I have lately been favoured by Professor Garrod with two specimens of a Land Leech which, some months since, he found with some others on a moist foot-

  1. Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist., 4th Series, vol. iii., p. 369.
  2. 'First Report and Abstract of Proceedings of the Croydon Microscopical Club,' 1871, pp. 22, 23.