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When she comes from the Chalicodoma of the Pebbles or Walls, whose opulent larva saturates her with food, she deserves by her large size the name of Leucopsis gigas, which Fabricius bestows upon her; when she comes from the Chalicodoma of the Sheds, she deserves no more than the name of L. grandis, which is all that Klug grants her.
Before our coral garden was as familiar as it is, it was said that on one of the reefs of Dunk Island there reposed a colossal clam one of the giants of the variety known to science as TRIDACNA GIGAS. So prodigious was the alleged specimen, that no one had been able to remove it, and it was dimly suggested that the occupant of the island would easily become possessed of a very marvel among molluscs.
From this they have inherited the mutability or the capacity of producing at their turn new mutants. But they seem to have done so incompletely, changing in the direction of more absolute constancy. This was especially observed in the case of rubrinervis, which is not of such rare occurrence as O. gigas, and which it has been possible to study in large numbers of individuals.
At the time of the Crimean War, the Institut de France received some packets of cartridges in which the bullets had been perforated by Sirex juvencus; a little later, at the Grenoble Arsenal, S. gigas carved himself a similar exit.
The question to be considered here is how far the claim is justified that the facts of this kind hitherto discovered afford an explanation of the process of evolution. It seems probable that mutations are of different kinds, as exemplified in Oenothera by gigas and rubricalyx respectively, the former producing only sterile hybrids, the latter behaving exactly like a Mendelian unit.
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