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"Branch Mollusca," Conseil said, "class Acephala, order Testacea." "Correct, my scholarly Conseil. Now then, those Testacea capable of producing pearls include rainbow abalone, turbo snails, giant clams, and saltwater scallops briefly, all those that secrete mother-of-pearl, in other words, that blue, azure, violet, or white substance lining the insides of their valves."
Lyell, namely, that the "longevity of the species in the mammalia is upon the whole inferior to that of the testacea." The great size of the bones of the Megatheroid animals, including the Megatherium, Megalonyx, Scelidotherium, and Mylodon, is truly wonderful.
In the present state of science, it is chiefly by the aid of shells that we are enabled to arrive at these results, for of all classes the testacea are the most generally diffused in a fossil state, and may be called the medals principally employed by nature in recording the chronology of past events.
The minute shells especially may be said to be unknown; a vigilant examination of the corals and excrescences upon the spondyli and pearl-oysters would signally increase our knowledge of the Rissoæ, Chemnitziæ, and other perforating testacea, whilst the dredge from the deep water will astonish the amateur by the wholly new forms it can scarcely fail to display.
Besides these, a beetle forming a peculiar species between Atopa and Cyphon; Cantharis cembricola Esch., and one resembling the testacea; a Hylecoetus, scarcely differing from dermestoides; Catops; a Heterocerus, broad and covered with whitish scales; an Elophorus; two Phaleriæ with a black ground; two kinds of Stenotrachelis, both larger than the European, which has hitherto borne the name of Dryops ænea; and in fact, the beetle in Banks's Museum, so called by Fabricius, is either the same, or a species very nearly resembling it, and it may therefore be conjectured that some mistake has accidentally occurred in the designation of its native country in that Museum.
They occur at all heights above the level of the ocean, having been observed at elevations of more than 8000 feet in the Pyrenees, 10,000 in the Alps, 13,000 in the Andes, and above 18,000 feet in the Himalaya. These shells belong mostly to marine testacea, but in some places exclusively to forms characteristic of lakes and rivers.
The following notes will serve to record the more prominent facts bearing upon the Bathymetrical distribution of the Testacea collected on the northern coast of Australia, at Port Essington, and on the eastern coast from Cape York to Bass Strait, including the northern ports of Van Diemen's Land. An extensive collection of landshells was made at Madeira.
We have seen that most of the fossil shells of the Older Pliocene strata of Suffolk which are of recent species are identical with testacea now living in British seas, yet some of them belong to Mediterranean species, and a few even of the genera are those of warmer climates.
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