Category: Nature: Molluscs

The Man Who Collects Slugs

At the meeting of the Wilts Archaeological Society at Warminster, on Tuesday 12th July 1904, Mr. Goddard read a letter from a Leeds slug collector wanting specimens from North Wilts. The Daily Mail, of Thursday 14th July 1904, contained some particulars about this slug collector:

There are few people (says the article) who on finding a slug in their garden do not instinctively shrink from it and are loath to touch it. Yet there is a Yorkshireman who has made slugs his hobby for twenty years. Mr. Denison Roebuck was the first person in Great Britain to specialise in slugs. In two or three years he was able to obtain some thousands of specimens from different parts of the British Isles. There are only seventeen species known to this country, and Mr. Roebuck has discovered from anatomical evidence five of them. Thus his hobby has been of service to science.

On Wednesday 13th July 1904 he explained that he had been a naturalist for some years before he found his distinctive study.

“Finding that slugs had been neglected,” he said, “I devoted my attention to them. I have been assisted by naturalists all over the country. There are only four counties in Great Britain from which we have not received some specimens – Hunts, Oxford, North Wilts, and Carmarthen. I am specially anxious to get living specimens from most counties except Yorkshire and the Midlands, which we have pretty well finished. Large and small slugs, common or rare, will be thankfully received. They must be alive, and should be packed in moss or grass in airtight tin boxes. The boxes must not have holes in them, and it is very important that the date and place of collection be given. Slugs are not all destructive, and only two are enemies of the gardener – the little black, tough-skinned slug of the garden known as Arion Hortensis, and the yellow slug of the field, the Agriolima Agrestis.”

Mr. Roebuck’s address is 259 Hyde Park Road, Leeds.

The results of Mr. Roebuck’s work will be published in the next volume of a monograph on land and fresh water mollusca of the British Isles, which is being edited by Mr. John W. Taylor, another distinguished Leeds naturalist. Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Taylor founded the Conchological Society and the Journal of Conchology, and Leeds has a Conchological Club, which is quite a model, for out of eleven members there is an average attendance of ten at the meetings.