1. The _mouth_ is generally, as in the common snail and periwinkle, placed on the lower part of the head, and may be either a mere aperture, circular or semicircular, in the head-mass, or, as is more usual, may be carried on a blunt snout (compare Fig. 6, p. 10, and Fig. 68, p. 159), which is capable of varying degrees of protrusion. From the retractile snout has doubtless been derived the long proboscis which is so prominent a feature of many genera (compare Figs. 1, B, and 99), and in some (_e.g._ _Mitra_, _Dolium_) attains a length exceeding that of the whole body. As a rule, Mollusca provided with a proboscis are carnivorous, while those whose mouth is on the surface of the head are Vegetable feeders, but this rule is by no means invariable. The mouth is thickened round the aperture into ‘lips,’ which are often extensile, and appear capable of closing upon and grasping the food. In the Pelecypoda the mouth is furnished, on each side, with a pair of special external lobes, the ‘labial palps,’ which appear to be of a highly sensitive nature, and whose object it is to collect, and possibly to taste, the food before it passes into the mouth. 2. The _Pharynx, Jaws, and Radula_.--Immediately behind the lips the mouth opens into the muscular throat, pharynx, or buccal mass. The pharynx of the Glossophora, _i.e._ of the Gasteropoda, Scaphopoda, and Cephalopoda, is distinguished from that of the Pelecypoda,[318] by the possession of two very characteristic organs for the rasping or trituration of food before it reaches the oesophagus and stomach. These are (_a_) the _jaw_ or _jaws_, and (_b_) the _radula_,[319] _odontophore_, or _lingual ribbon_. The jaws bite the food, the radula tears it up small before it passes into the stomach to undergo digestion. The jaws are not set with teeth like our own; roughly speaking, the best idea of the relations of the molluscan jaw and radula may be obtained by imagining our own teeth removed from our jaws and set in parallel rows along a greatly prolonged tongue.[320]