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They followed an attractive and exceedingly promising path, but it led to the bottom of a cliff, not to the summit. The mollusks, clams, and snails took an easier, down-hill road. They formed a shell, and it developed large enough to cover them. It hampered and almost destroyed locomotion and reduced nerve to a minimum. But nerves are nothing but a nuisance anyhow. And why should they move?
But the word "shell-oysters" had been overheard; and there was a perceptible crowding movement towards their newly discovered habitat, a large soup-tureen. Silas Peckham had meantime fallen upon another locality of these recent mollusks. He said nothing, but helped himself freely, and made a sign to Mrs. Peckham. "Lorindy," he whispered, "shell-oysters!"
His central home is in the marshes of Russia and Prussia; his food the mollusks which swarm among the reed-beds where he builds; and feeding on those from reed-bed to reed bed, all across what was once the German Ocean, has come the beautiful little bird with long tail, orange tawny plumage, and black moustache, which might have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on ever reed-rond of the Fen.
Between whiles he occupied his time in collecting oysters or other mollusks, of which they consumed a great quantity. Godfrey reserved for himself the care of the domestic animals and the poultry. The butchering trade was hardly to his taste, but he soon overcame his repugnance.
But more perfect specimens enabled Professor Owen, in 1858, to show that this fossil animal was a Saurian reptile, which probably fed on shell-bearing mollusks, and used its short and flat teeth, so thickly coated with enamel, for pounding and crushing the shells. Voltzia heterophylla. Portion of same magnified to show fructification. Sulzbad.
A shrimp-like crustacean obtained in the irrigated sementeras is also boiled and eaten entire. A few mollusks are eaten after being cooked. One, called kitan, I have seen eaten many times; it is a snail-like animal, and after being boiled it is sucked into the mouth after the apex of the shell has been bitten or broken off.
To the south, the valley of the Nile tells exactly the same story. The holes bored by miocene mollusks in the cliffs east and west of Cairo bear witness that, in the miocene epoch, it contained an arm of the sea, the bottom of which has since been gradually filled up by the alluvium of the Nile, and elevated to its present position.
"One of its kinsfolk," I replied; "the ibis feeds, generally speaking, on worms, mollusks, and even on sea-weed or aquatic plants. It may, perhaps, sometimes eat water-snakes; but as to feeding exclusively on reptiles, or destroying them systematically, that's quite another story."
Of invertebrate land animals the same must be said. The land mollusks and the great order of insects and other land arthropods only to a minor extent dwell in the open light. Very many species haunt the semi-obscurity of trees or groves, hide among the grasses, lurk under bark, sticks, and stones, or dwell through most of their lives underground. Hosts of others are nocturnal.
We dredged it in one hundred and twenty fathoms, on the west side of Barbados, alive, and kept it alive for twenty-four hours, during which time the animal expanded and showed its remarkable peculiarities. It is unquestionably the type of a distinct family, entirely different from the other Mollusks with which it has been hitherto associated. Mr.
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