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Updated: May 16, 2025
Pteropods constituted another class in his division of the type of Mollusks; but these animals, again, form only an order in the class of Gasteropoda, as Brachiopods form an order in the class of Acephala. In the third division of the Animal Kingdom, the Articulates, we have again three classes: Worms, Crustacea, and Insects.
By its aid he obtained a new means of ascertaining the relations between fossil and living mollusks. It was of vast service to him in preparing his "Etudes critiques sur les Mollusques fossiles," a quarto volume with nearly one hundred plates.
We know as yet almost nothing of their history; when deciphered it will be as strange as any romance. The vertebrates are of course the most important line, as including the ancestors of man. But we must take a little glance at mollusks, including our clams, snails, and cuttle-fishes; and at the articulates, including annelids and culminating in insects.
Transparent objects, particularly crystals which will not polarize, diatoms, infusoria, palates of mollusks, etc., can not only be seen to greater advantage, but their parts can be more easily studied.
In the past the poor things had often been pinched by hunger and neglect, and at times their only food was rock oysters, clams and crabs. Great quantities of these shell-fish could be gathered in the bay near at hand, but the mountain Indians, who had heretofore lived on the flesh of mammal, did not take kindly to mollusks, and, indeed, ate the shell-fish only as a last resort.
But the ants will labor ingloriously without an observer to chronicle their doings, and the archivists and annalists will pile up facts forever like so many articulates or mollusks or radiates, until the vertebrate historian comes with his generalizing ideas, his beliefs, his prejudices, his idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and brings the facts into a more or less imperfect, but still organic series of relations.
Subsequent investigations have proved that they include a great variety of beings: some of them belonging to the type of Mollusks; others to the type of Articulates, being in fact little Shrimps; while many others are the locomotive germs of plants, and so far from forming a class by themselves, as a distinct group in the Animal Kingdom, they seem to comprise representatives of all types except Vertebrates, and to belong in part to the Vegetable Kingdom, Siebold, Leuckart, and other modern zoölogists, have considered them as a primary type, and called them Protozoa; but this is as great a mistake as the other.
The hermit-crab was once equipped with a hard shell and with as good means of locomotion as other crabs. But instead of courageously following the hardy life of other crustaceans it formed the bad habit of taking up its residence in the cast-off shells of mollusks. This made life easy and indolent. But it paid the price of all shirking.
Their harder parts the shells of mollusks, the white framework of corals, the carapaces of crabs and other crustaceans, the shells of sea urchins, the bones and teeth of fishes are gradually buried within the accumulating sheets of sediment, either whole or, far more often, broken into fragments by the waves.
The former includes a fine exhibit of mounted mammals and some 1,600 birds, as well as reptiles, fishes, mollusks and insects, in all of which particular effort has been made to show forms native to the State.
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