An ancient invention, its precursor has been identified in worms and molluscs and even among the starfish.

In fact, his beak is often notched by the sharp, hard edges of the shells of these molluscs; and at times, he haunts the low banks of mud and ooze near the sea, and there picks up worms and other soft-bodied animals.

Some of these molluscs do not build shells.

The crab, and other crustaceans, also have a hard covering to their soft bodies; but it is not at all like the shell of a Snail, or other mollusc.

In our coloured pictures you see many different kinds of shells, some of them built by uni-valve molluscs and some by bi-valve molluscs.

In our coloured pictures you see many different kinds of shells, some of them built by uni-valve molluscs and some by bi-valve molluscs.

He prefers to eat other molluscshe is carnivorous, a flesh-eater; but these other molluscs do not wait to be eaten.

There are other molluscs which find their meals in this strange manner, and many others which, like the Periwinkle, feed more easily on seaweed.

EXERCISES 1. Give the names of two bi-valve molluscs.

Give the names of three one-shelled molluscs.

In the last lesson we called them bi-valve molluscs, which is only another way of saying "soft-bodied animals with two shells."

The Snail, and other one-shelled molluscs, poke their heads out of the shell when feeding or moving.

Another mollusc used as food is the Cockle, and its shell is one of the commonest found along the shore, especially near sandy places.

There are many other interesting molluscs, besides those we have looked at.

Hard rocks and wood are perforated by these little molluscs.

In this strange order of molluscs there are dwarfs and giants.

What is the meaning of the words "mollusc" and "octopus"?

Land and water were then distinguishable,but as yet there was no terrestrial animal, nothing organic but radiata and molluscs, holly-footed and head-footed, and other aquatic monstrosities, mailed, plated, and buckler-headed, casting the shovel-nosed shark of the present Cosmos entirely into the shade, in point of horned, toothed, and serrated horrors.

We are often fallaciously confident in supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate estimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc (so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding softness and low place in the scale of being.

Your mollusc, on the contrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather than to himself.

A play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc.

There he is nowcoming up to the full estate of manhood by the various stages of protozoon, amoeba, mollusc, fish, reptile, bird, mammal, Man.

Thus, beginning with the larvae of ascidians (a marine mollusc,) we get by development to fish lowly organized (as the lancelet), thence to ganoids and other fish, then to amphibians.

The immovable mollusc does not reason about the choice of its home.

This mollusc, allied to Litiopa, Professor E. Forbes has done me the honour to publish in the Appendix as Macgillivrayia pelagica.)