Diversions of a NaturalistLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
Diversions of a Naturalist
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history
Though "shells" are often numerous on parts of the seashore, some
beaches (as, for instance, at Falmouth, at the mouth of the Eden of St.
Andrews, and at Herm in the Channel Islands) being so placed in regard
to the currents and waves of the sea that great quantities of shells
of dozens of species are thrown up, and even "make up" the beach, yet
there are not so very many Molluscs which live commonly on the shore
between tide-marks. The shells which are accumulated as shell-beaches
have come from animals which lived in quantity at depths of ten or
twenty fathoms, whence they can be brought up alive by the dredge.
There are, however, certain bivalves and certain univalves which are
commonly to be found in the living state between tide-marks. You will
not find the oyster there on our own coast, but in Australia they have
picnic parties where every guest provides himself with a hammer and a
bottle of vinegar and a pepper-pot, and at low tide proceeds to chip
the oysters off the rocks on which they grow tightly fixed, and to eat
them "right away" before they have time to lose their good temper and
sweetness! In Jamaica they show you oysters apparently growing on trees
high up in the air, but they are dead, having attached themselves to
the branches of a young tree which dipped into the water. Once fixed
there, they were unable to move as the tree grew and carried them up
with its branches above the sea-level.
The only bivalve at all common and visible to the eye between
tide-marks is the common or edible sea-mussel, which is attached
in purple clusters to the rocks (as in North Cornwall), or forms a
wide-spreading pavement, called a "scalp," of as much as an acre in
extent, on which thousands of mussels lie side by side. But by digging
in the sand and mud between tides there are other living bivalves to be
found, which burrow more or less deeply. The razor-shell (Fig. 19, b)
is one of these (see p. 80). Often (as at Teignmouth and Barmouth) we
find "cockles" buried in the sand, and those delicate, smooth bivalves
not an inch long, white outside and purple within, which are made into
soup at Naples and are called "vongoli," but have no English name.
Other "clams" (Tapes, which is eaten in France, even in Paris, and Mya,
and Scrobicularia which lives in black mud) may be dug up, but they are
devoid of English names because we do not eat them; hence I have to
speak of them by their Latin scientific names. As to univalves, there
are three which are found almost everywhere on our coasts where there
are rocks, namely, the periwinkles (one species of which actually
lives above high tide-mark), the limpet, and the dog-whelk. A small
species of top-shell or trochus is also very common, and so is the
chiton, or armadillo-shell, which, though really the most primitive
and nearest representative of the ancestors of all univalve molluscs,
yet has its own shell of a very peculiar character (sometimes with
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