On Suffolk Earth Worms

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ON SUFFOLK EARTH WORMS.

ON SUFFOLK EARTH WORMS. DÜRING the

BY ARTHUR MAYFIELD, F.L.S.

summer of 1892 I devoted some time to hunting for Oligochaets* in the neighbourhood of Norwich, and succeeded infindingfourteen species of Earth-worms and one allied freshwater form. A record of these Worms was included by the Revd. Hilderic Friend, under whose guidance I worked, in a paper entitled ' Some Norfolk Annelids,' published in Trans. Norf. Nat. Soc. ix, p. 394. Since that time I had given little attention to this small but interesting branch of our fauna until about a year ago, when I promised to make, for the Suffolk Naturalists' Society, a record of such Worms as might come under my notice in this county. I am afraid that my efforts have been somewhat desultory, because I have had several other irons in the fire. However I am able to place on record the existence here of a dozen species of Earth-worms, to which must be added a freshwater Worm that was found in a well at Mildenhall in 1907 and published by Mr. Friend, by whom it was described as Anagaster fontinalis. The aforesaid Worms are not distributed equally throughout the county, of course ; for, as Isaac Walton has said, " there are also divers other kinds of worms which, for colour and shape, alter even as the ground out of which they are got: as the marsh-worm, the oak-worm, the gilt-tail, the twachel or lobworm." Now, although some of these cannot be identified as true Earth-worms because Walton included in his loose term ' worms' f all kinds of grubs and caterpillars, yet there is a sufficiency of truth in his Statement to Warrant the expectation of finding different Worm-populations, according as one examines a garden, a marsh, or a rotten tree-stump. [The parent Worm lays a number of eggs in one little horny cocoon or sac, which contains also a nutritiousfluidwhereon the offspring feed as soon as hatching has taken place. One *At leastfive-and-twentyspecies of these Earth-worms were known as British forty years ago (sec. List in Sei. Gossip 1893, p.31 ; pace our Trans, p. 7, supra). Now we know nearly forty indigenous kinds.— Hon. Secretary. fOf these other worms, we can at present claim no more than the Horse Leech (Hcemopsis sanguisuga), abundant in water everywhere throughout Suffolk and notably in ditches at Southtown ; along with the Land Leech (Trocheta viridis), which used to be taken in the garden of Dallinghoo rectory about 1858 by the Revd. Ellis Walford (teste W. H. Tuck, inlit. 15th July, 1913). But both these belong to the Tribe Hirudinea whereof Britain has a score of species, and not to the Tribe Chaetopoda like the Earth-worms ; however, both tribes pertain to the Order Coelomata.—Ed.


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