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Out of fifteen species of shells of the genera Paludina, Melania, Ampullaria, and Unio, all are extinct or unknown species with the exception of four, which are still inhabitants of Indian rivers. Such a proportion of living to extinct mollusca agrees well with the usual character of an Upper Miocene or Falunian fauna, as observed in Touraine, or in the basin of Vienna and elsewhere.
Every morning each person, man or woman, to whom is allotted a certain number of trees, goes the round of the whole and collects in a large vessel the milky sap which trickles from gashes made in the bark on the preceding evening, and which is received in little clay cups, or in ampullaria shells stuck beneath the wounds.
The descent of the Ampullaria, and other fresh-water molluscs, into the mud of the tanks, has its parallel in the conduct of the Bulimi and Helices on land. The European snail, in the beginning of winter, either buries itself in the earth or withdraws to some crevice or overarching stone to await the returning vegetation of spring.
But the faculty of becoming torpid at such periods is not confined in Ceylon to the crocodile sand fishes; it is also possessed by some of the fresh-water mollusca and aquatic coleoptera. One of the former, the Ampullaria glauca, is found in still water in all parts of the island, not alone in the tanks, but in rice-fields and the watercourses by which they are irrigated.
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