United States or Norfolk Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The cadaver had a beaver-cap ornamented with disks of copper containing the bones of the cranium, which had fallen apart. About the neck were long wampum necklaces with dentalium, unionida, and auricula, interspersed with beads. There were also strings of the pieces of Haliotis from the Gulf of California, so valued by the Indians on this side of the Rocky Mountains.

These may be seen buzzing in hundreds over the pools on a wet evening, and with them the sooty Mystacides, called silverhorns in Scotland, from their antennae, which are of preposterous length, and ringed prettily enough with black and white. These delicate fairies make moveable cases, or rather pipes, of the finest sand, generally curved, and resembling in shape the Dentalium shell.

Triton verruculosus, G.B. Sowerby. 18. Sigaretus subglobosus, G.B. Sowerby. 19. Natica solida, G.B. Sowerby. Terebra undulifera, G.B. Sowerby. 21. Terebra costellata, G.B. Sowerby. 22. Dentalium giganteum, do. 24. Dentalium sulcosum, do. 25. Cardium multiradiatum, do. 27. Venus meridionalis, do. 28. Pecten, fragments of.

The results are much less uniformly geometric than where the fabric is followed; yet the mere adding of the figures, stitch by stitch or part by part, is sufficient to impart a large share of geometricity, as may be seen in the buckskin bead work and in the dentalium and quill work of the Indians.

In the South-eastern province we find in forty and forty-five fathoms on a muddy bottom in Bass Strait, Turritella sinuata, Trochus nebulosus, a Pleurotoma, an Emarginula, a Dentalium, two species of Cardita, a Cypricardia, a Venus, a Nucula, and Pectunculus holosericeus.

I collected the following extinct shells, of which the Turritella was in great numbers: Bulla cosmophila, G.B. Sowerby. 2. Pleurotoma subaequalis, G.B. Sowerby. 3. Fusus cleryanus, d'Orbigny, "Voyage Pal." Triton leucostomoides, G.B. Sowerby. 5. Venus, probably a distinct species, but very imperfect. 7. Dentalium majus, G.B. Sowerby. This fine island is about one hundred miles in length.