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Updated: May 28, 2025
Woodward has shown that the same law holds good with sea-shells, but from the wide distribution of most genera of molluscs, it is not well displayed by them. Other cases could be added, as the relation between the extinct and living land-shells of Madeira; and between the extinct and living brackish-water shells of the Aralo-Caspian Sea.
In the same way, nearly all the Molluscs that have spiral shells roll their coils from left to right. Among the numerous species in both land and water fauna, only a very few are exceptional and turn from right to left.
He prefers to pull the poor Crab to pieces with his strong arms, and then to pick up the crab-meat with the hooked beak. When full-fed, he retires to his den; he sometimes pulls shells and stones over the entrance, and rests within until hungry. In this strange order of molluscs there are dwarfs and giants. One kind is never more than two inches long, others are vast monsters.
Apart, in separate compartments, were spread out chaplets of pearls of the greatest beauty, which reflected the electric light in little sparks of fire; pink pearls, torn from the pinna-marina of the Red Sea; green pearls of the haliotyde iris; yellow, blue and black pearls, the curious productions of the divers molluscs of every ocean, and certain mussels of the water-courses of the North; lastly, several specimens of inestimable value which had been gathered from the rarest pintadines.
Bland, in a paper read before the American Philosophical Society, on "The Geology and Physical Geography of the West Indies, with reference to the distribution of Mollusca," states his opinion that Porto Rico, the Virgins, the Anguilla group, Cuba, the Bahamas, and Hayti, once formed continuous dry land that obtained its land molluscs from Central America and Mexico.
Is it not strange that this creature, with a body as soft as your tongue, should earn its living by breaking into houses made of hard shell! There are other molluscs which find their meals in this strange manner, and many others which, like the Periwinkle, feed more easily on seaweed.
They must have been joined together by ligaments, and even surrounded by muscles at the time of their interment. Hence we have almost always to pass down through a mass of incumbent loam with land shells, or through fine sand with freshwater molluscs, before we get into the beds of gravel containing hatchets.
The historic sculptures that so deeply move our pity for a conquered people, are based upon the immemorial sculptures of creatures whose sacrifice in whole hecatombs touches us not, because it is part of the order of the world by which life forms the foundation of and minister to life. It is strange how many of the grandest monuments are wrought out of the creations of primeval molluscs.
The land molluscs of the district are the only animals which aestivate; they are found in clusters, Bulimi and Helices, concealed in hollow trees, the mouths of their shells closed by a film of mucus. The fine weather breaks up often with great suddenness about the beginning of February. Violent squalls from the west or the opposite direction to the trade-wind then occur.
Then, realizing how this "population pullulante des petits animaux marins" must have impressed the observing ancients, he goes on to touch ever so lightly! upon those old local arts of ornamentation whereby sea-beasts and molluscs and aquatic plants were reverently copied by master-hand, not from dead specimens, but "pris sur le vif et observes au milieu des eaux"; he explains how an entire school grew up, which drew its inspiration from the dainty ... apes and movements of these frail creatures.
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