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Two unequal branches of the early wormlike organisms shrank into strong protective shells. The lower branch became the Brachiopods; the more advanced branch the Molluscs. In the Mollusc world, in turn, there are several early types developed.
Moreover, he said, "the infinitesimal calculus of Leibnitz will show you that the architecture of the Louvre is less learned than that of a snail: the eternal geometer has unrolled his transcendent spirals on the shell of the mollusc that you, like the vulgar profane, know only seasoned with spinach and Dutch cheese."
I approached this extraordinary mollusc. It adhered by its filaments to a table of granite, and there, isolated, it developed itself in the calm waters of the grotto. I estimated the weight of this tridacne at 600 lb. Such an oyster would contain 30 lb. of meat; and one must have the stomach of a Gargantua to demolish some dozens of them.
The famous spiral of the geometers is the general plan followed by the Mollusc rolling its stone sheath. Where do these glairy creatures pick up this science? We are told that the Mollusc derives from the Worm. One day, the Worm, rendered frisky by the sun, emancipated itself, brandished its tail and twisted it into a corkscrew for sheer glee.
The highest group, the Cephalopods, "keep their heads," in the literal sense, and we shall find them advancing from form to form until, in the octopus of a later age, they discard the ancestral shell, and become the aristocrats of the Mollusc kingdom. The last and most important line that led upward from the chaos of Archaean worms is that of the Arthropods.
Of course it is unlikely that the eye of the vertebrate and that of the mollusc have been built up by a series of variations due to simple chance.
Then the beaches, during the first three months are not particularly fertile, nor are the shells to be found special or peculiar. In April many specimens of the mollusc known as Tapes, of which there are several species, are cast ashore, empty but fresh.
A slim but shapely mollusc known as Terebellum or augur, to mention another conceited little disturber of your meditations, stands on its spire in the sand, and screws as you tread, cutting, a delightfully symmetrical hole in the sole of your foot, and retaining the core perfect as that of a diamond drill.
Australia, according to the address mentioned, has at last furnished to palæontologists the real missing link, not between men and apes, which they have generally given up, but between vertebrate and invertebrate animals. So that the famous ascidian mollusc, with a semi-vertebral larval stage, which nourished in the writings of Darwin and others, is no longer needful.
The Epeira, therefore, is versed in the geometric secrets of the Ammonite and the Nautilus pompilus; she uses, in a simpler form, the logarithmic line dear to the Snail. What guides her? There is no appeal here to a wriggle of some kind, as in the case of the Worm that ambitiously aspires to become a Mollusc. The animal must needs carry within itself a virtual diagram of its spiral.
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