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Darwin Correspondence Project

To ?   17 June 1881

Glenrhydding House | Patterdale, Penrith

June 17th. 1881.

Dear Sir

I am much obliged to you for your kindness in having sent me the enclosed paper.1 The case is a very curious one & an awful look-out for palæontologists.— Is it not believed that there are many analogous cases with the Pulmoniferæ?2 One expression astonishes me, (but I suppose this is owing to my ignorance) when he speaks of it as not being established that one mollusc can be parasitic within the shell of another.—3

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully & obliged | Charles Darwin

Footnotes

1
Neither the paper nor the correspondent has been identified.
2
Pulmonifera is a former order of molluscs, roughly equivalent to the informal group Pulmonata, or pulmonates, snails and slugs that breathe with a pallial lung.
3
In their description of the tiny sea snail, Odostomia eulimoides (a synonym of Brachystomia eulimoides; Forbes and Hanley 1853, 3: 276), the authors Edward Forbes and Sylvanus Hanley noted that the principal habitat of this species was ‘the back of the auricles of the Pecten opercularis … where they may be seen in clusters imbedded in the mucus’. Pecten opercularis is a synonym of Aequipecten opercularis, the queen scallop. Auricles are ear-shaped appendages on the dorsal margin of the scallop’s shell.

Bibliography

Forbes, Edward and Hanley, Sylvanus. 1853. A history of British Mollusca and their shells. 4 vols. London: John Van Voorst.

Summary

Thanks correspondent for sending paper on molluscs.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-13208
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Unidentified
Sent from
Patterdale
Source of text
American Philosophical Society (Mss.B.D25.591)
Physical description
ALS 1p

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13208,” accessed on 19 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13208.xml

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