The attractions offered by such products of tropical seas are by no means limited to the untutored tastes of the American Indian. In India, China, and Siam, the _Pyrum_, and other large and beautiful shells of the Indian Ocean, are no less highly prized by the natives, not only as an easily wrought material for implements and personal ornaments; but in some cases, as vessels employed in their most sacred rites. A sinistrorsal variety found on the coasts of Tranquebar and Ceylon, is devoted by the Cingalese exclusively to such purposes. Reversed shells of the species _Turbinella_, are held in like veneration in China, where great prices are given for them; and are often curiously ornamented with elaborate carvings, as shown on several fine specimens in the British Museum. They are kept in the pagodas, and are not only employed by the priests on special occasions in administering medicine to the sick; but the vessel for holding the consecrated oil, with which the Emperor is anointed at his coronation, is made from one of them. Such analogies in the choice of materials, and in objects set apart for the sacred rites of different nations, are full of interest in reference to characteristics common to man in all ages, and in regions the most remote. But when they are met with in the arts and customs of the same continent, they point with greater probability to borrowed usages, and often help the ethnologist to track the footprints of migrating nations to their earlier homes. But the use of shells for personal ornaments has been traced back, along with other evidence of the antiquity of man, almost to what seems the primeval dawn. In the caves of southern France and Italy, along with mammoth and reindeer bones and ivory, and in the sepulchral deposits at Aurignac, lay shell necklaces or bracelets made of the _Littorina littorea_, still abundant on the shores of the Atlantic, along with perforated shells of the miocene period, evidently gathered in a fossil state to be converted to purposes of personal decoration. So also in a later, but still prehistoric age, the megalithic tomb, brought to light, in 1838, under the Knock-Maraidhe Cromlech in the Phœnix Park, Dublin, disclosed two male skeletons, underneath the skulls of which lay a number of the common _Nerita littoralis_, perforated, evidently for the purpose of being strung together as neck ornaments. An ornamental bone-pin, with a knob carved at each end, and a rude flint-knife, constituted the only other contents of this primitive tomb which had been constructed with such costly toil.