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Updated: June 16, 2025
Many years ago people believed that it belonged to the vegetable kingdom; but it is now known to belong to the animal kingdom. The animals attach themselves to rocks, shells and other hard substances below water. Mussels, clams and sponges are cultivated to some extent. Mollusks are useful in many other ways than as food. Their shells are used for making buttons, parasol handles and shirt studs.
I have devoted myself especially to the organization of the invertebrate animals, and to the facts bearing upon the perfecting of their classification. I have succeeded in tracing the same identity of structure between the three classes of radiates, and also between those of mollusks, as has already been recognized in the vertebrates, and partially in the articulates.
Mammals and birds are the victims of parasitical insects; fishes have been reserved for the crustaceans, who do not disdain also to fasten upon their humble neighbors, the mollusks; and even among themselves the little ones settle down on the great.
At many places corals formed thin reefs, as at Louisville, Kentucky, where the hardness of the reef rock is one of the causes of the Falls of the Ohio. Sponges, echinoderms, brachiopods, and mollusks were abundant. The cephalopods take a new departure.
And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, mollusks, and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin; so the most complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose well-being he has to consult.
We have found, then, Radiates, Mollusks, and Articulates in plenty; and now what is to be said of Vertebrates in these old times, of the highest and most important division of the Animal Kingdom, that to which we ourselves belong? They were represented by Fishes alone; and the Fish chapter in the history of the early organic world is a curious, and, as it seems to me, a very significant one.
Like a torrent the sea was rushing into our retreat, and since we definitely were not mollusks, we had to clear out. In a few seconds we were safe on top of the cave. "What happened?" Conseil asked. "Some new phenomenon?" "Not quite, my friends!" I replied. "It was the tide, merely the tide, which wellnigh caught us by surprise just as it did Sir Walter Scott's hero!
Charles Darwin talks about reaches to vertebrates clad in crinoline, as well as to mollusks in shells, or articulates in jointed scales, or anything that fights for breathing-room and food and love in any coat of fur or feather! Happy they who can flash defiance from bright eyes and snowy shoulders back into the pendants of the insolent lustres!
Interesting examples of this are to be found in the way in which pearls are formed in various mollusks. In the pearl oysters of Ceylon occur some of the best pearls. If these are carefully sectioned there may usually be found at the center the remains of certain cestode larvæ whose presence in the oyster caused it to deposit the nacreous layers that make up the pearl.
These shells and armors begat a kind of torpor and immobility which has continued down to our day with the echinoderms and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebrates escaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and I are here without imprisoning shells on our backs; but how or why did we escape? Bergson does not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance?
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