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It is doubtful whether animals built on a different plan a mollusc or an insect, for instance cut matter up along the same articulations. It is not indeed necessary that they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to perceive objects, it is enough to distinguish properties.
This is driven to the Oyster's mouth and swallowed. The Oyster, fixed in its "bed," unable to hunt for food, thus makes its dinner come to it. What a strange use for a "beard"! It not only serves as lungs, but also helps the animal to catch its "daily bread"! Another mollusc used as food is the Cockle, and its shell is one of the commonest found along the shore, especially near sandy places.
The hornbills would, at all events, afford them an ample meal for that day, and they might reasonably expect to obtain a further supply of shell-fish from the seashore; though Nub might not succeed in finding another huge mollusc. "Shall we remove the ladder?" asked Walter. "It might help to build the house." "I tink not," answered Nub, looking up.
By repeated tiny bites, similar to the tweaks which we saw distributed at the outset, the flesh of the Mollusc is converted into a gruel on which the various banqueters nourish themselves without distinction, each working at the broth by means of some special pepsine and each taking his own mouthfuls of it.
"But where can they obtain this jelly-like substance?" asked Emily. "I believe it is produced from a mollusc of some sort, on which the birds feed. When they require to build their nests, they disgorge the gelatinous portion for the purpose; and as this substance possesses the nutritive qualities of animal matter, I have little doubt that it is produced from these molluscs," said Mr Hooker.
This last will assuredly be broken again and yet again, so long as the British Resident occupies the position of an official mollusc. The chiefs themselves perceive and admit the evils that must arise out of the absence of any effective central authority.
A few disordered movements betray a brief excitement on the part of the mollusc and then everything ceases: the foot no longer slugs; the front-part loses its graceful swan-neck curve; the tentacles become limp and give way under their weight, dangling feebly like a broken stick. This conditions persists. Is the Snail really dead? Not at all, for I am free to resuscitate the seeming corpse.
This creature accomplishes by calculation, choice, and dexterity that which a subtle chemical process does unconsciously for the more advanced mollusc, and that it practised the art of the interlocking of atoms ages before the birth of Macadam can scarcely be doubted.
In this case, it would be possible to proceed little by little to a solution more and more plausible, and there would be the more chance of a successful issue the more resolutely we assumed the evolutionist hypothesis. Let us place side by side the eye of a vertebrate and that of a mollusc such as the common Pecten. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements.
So that you have all the 'Fauna' reduced, at this period, to four forms: one a kind of animal or plant that we know nothing about, and three undoubted animals two crustaceans and one mollusc.
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