Ɛpsilon

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

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.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 Penrith] above del ‘Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13208,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13208