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The animals from which they proceed have not been identified at either of these places, and the mystery remains unsolved, whether the sounds at Batticaloa are given forth by fishes or by molluscs.
Ah, I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God. Thus did the sea give a stone to the hungry one. And they themselves may well originate from the sea. Certainly, one findeth pearls in them: thereby they are the more like hard molluscs. And instead of a soul, I have often found in them salt slime.
We have seen how, in the succession of marine forms, there would be something like a progress from the lower to the higher: bringing us in the end to predaceous molluscs, crustaceans, and fish. What are likely to succeed fish?
I think you will have to modify your belief about the difficulty of dispersal of land molluscs; I was interrupted when beginning to experimentise on the just-hatched young adhering to the feet of ground-roosting birds.
The desire of killing and devouring appears in the most unexpected quarters, among creatures which no one would suspect of such intentions. Of two kinds of water snail found in the Thames, and among the commonest molluscs, one is a vegetable feeder. It is found living on water plants, the snails being of all sizes, from that of a mustard seed to a walnut.
And without waiting for a reply to this proposal, knowing that it would be approved of, the sailor and Neb detached a quantity of the molluscs. They put them in a sort of net of hibiscus fiber, which Neb had manufactured, and which already contained food; they then continued to climb the coast between the downs and the sea.
Among the molluscs and zoophytes, I found in the meshes of the net several species of alcyonarians, echini, hammers, spurs, dials, cerites, and hyalleae.
Monstrous oysters bear witness to the prosperity of that ancient and interesting family of the Molluscs. In some species the shells were commonly ten inches long; the double shell of one of these Tertiary bivalves has been found which measured thirteen inches in length, eight in width, and six in thickness.
Some people would not have called them treasures, though they were looked upon as such by Mercer, who was exceedingly proud of a snake-skin which he found in a patch of dwarf furze, and of a great snail shell that was nearly white, and had belonged to one of the molluscs used by the Romans for their soup.
Again, at the still later epoch when the beech-tree abounded, tools of iron were introduced, and were gradually substituted for those of bronze. On the coasts of the Danish islands in the Baltic, certain mounds, called in those countries "Kjokken-modding," or "kitchen-middens," occur, consisting chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle, periwinkle, and other eatable kinds of molluscs.
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