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Updated: May 6, 2025
Bynoe saw one in Tierra del Fuego eating a cuttle-fish; and at Low's Harbour, another was killed in the act of carrying to its hole a large volute shell. What a succession of chances, or what changes of level must have been brought into play, thus to spread these small animals throughout this broken archipelago! It is said that some rapacious birds bring their prey alive to their nests.
A similar geometry is found in the other shells with elongated cones, Turritellae, Spindle-shells, Cerithia, as well as in the shells with flattened cones, Trochidae, Turbines. The spherical shells, those whirled into a volute, are no exception to this rule. All, down to the common Snail-shell, are constructed according to logarithmic laws.
The origin of the forms employed in stone buildings is most clearly shewn by the frequent occurrence of the volute, a curvilinear element suggested by the use and peculiar properties of metal. We find these volutes everywhere, upon shafts of stone and wood indifferently.
This central point is indefinitely inaccessible at each approaching turn. It is obvious that this property is beyond our sensory scope. Even with the help of the best philosophical instruments, our sight could not follow its interminable windings and would soon abandon the attempt to divide the invisible. It is a volute to which the brain conceives no limits.
The ground is strewed with shells and covered with acanthus-leaves; but no shell had suggested the Ionic volute, no acanthus-leaf had suggested the Corinthian foliage. The vast columns, with the sudden tapering, the overhanging capitals, the stern, square abacus, all betoken the infancy of art.
They are the outside layers of the pendulum of that graceful plant, the purple flower-cone that hangs at the end of the fruit cluster with its volute and royal-hued stem. The banana-plants, which we call trees, lined the road and stood twenty feet high, their long slender leaves blowing in the light wind like banners from a castle wall. The flakes that had dropped upon the ground were lovely.
Large, and grandly made, Hesper stood "straight, and steady, and tall," dusky-fair, and colorless, with the carriage of a young matron. Her brown hair seemed ever scathed and crinkled afresh by the ethereal flame that here and there peeped from amid the unwilling volute rolled back from her creamy forehead in a rebellious coronet.
The lines denoting the ascending spirals, and the pencil dots not yet touched, are my guides, and, with small hand saw, No. 30, I cut very carefully, by a dot at a time just low enough to touch the spiral line at its junction, cutting the bit away sideways, of course, just by the said line, and then a small piece more, until I arrive at the end of where the spiral ceases, at its base; but now that the volute is developing, I am enabled to complete the line, which brings the whole to its actual junction with the mainspring of conception.
The same kind of cornice finishes the east gable and the nave walls, and also runs round the apses, but with richer mouldings above it, especially round the central one. The curious Dalmatian square-leaf enrichment, channelled in six radiating striæ, and terminating in a small volute at the top corner occurs here.
Many architectural fragments have been found during the excavations of the Great Bath, several portions of columns 2ft. 6in. diameter at base, and several sections of Corinthian foliage with the volute of a capital, of unusually artistic and powerful work; some smaller columns, a fluted shaft, and a Composite capital of debased character; but the four most remarkable fragments are pieces carved on both sides out of blocks about 1ft. 9in. thick, by 1ft. 6in. high.
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