Land molluscs

Abstract

The study of the land molluscs of southern Africa had a late start. Linnaeus (1758), although writing his great works more than a century after the first white settlement at the Cape of Good Hope was established (1652), knew as yet not a single terrestrial snail from that area. Ferdinand Krauss’s book (1848), again almost one hundred years later, is the first landmark in southern African non-marine malacology. This German scientist enumerated about forty species of terrestrial gastropods among a great host of marine and some fluviatile molluscs. Krauss described snails collected by himself in the years 1838–1840, by the famous Swedish traveller J. A. Wahlberg (killed by an elephant in 1856), and by various others. The first major work solely devoted to the non-marine molluscs of the area is that by the Austrian Rudolf Sturany (1898) who catalogued the material collected by his countryman Dr. A. Penther. Sturany enumerates about 335 terrestrial forms among a total of 408 non-marine species. About a decade before Sturany’s work was published, there was a renewed interest in southern African land snails, initiated and particularly activated by a local man, Henry Clifden Burnup, a resident of Pietermaritzburg, Natal. Originally he worked with the British team of J. C. Melvill and J. H. Ponsonby, which resulted in 22 papers, mainly in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in the period 1890–1909 (checklist in Proceedings of the Malacological Society of London 1898). Later he closely co-operated with the famous malacologist Matthew Kemble Connolly.

Financial support by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (C.S.I.R., Pretoria) and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Zuiver Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Z.W.O., The Hague) is gratefully acknowledged.