edule_), which rather affects the muddy flats of estuaries than sand beaches, though not uncommon here. This latter, though much inferior in sapidity to the great spinous sort, forms a far more important item in the category of human food, from its very general distribution, its extreme abundance, and the ease with which it is collected. Wherever the receding tide leaves an area of exposed mud, the common cockle is sure to be found, and hundreds of men, women, and children may be seen plodding and groping over the sinking surface, with naked feet and bent backs, picking up the shell‐fish by thousands, to be boiled and eaten for home consumption, or to be cried through the lanes and alleys of the neighbouring towns by stentorian boys who vociferate all day long, ‘Here’s your fine cockles, here! Here they are! Here they are! Twopence a quart!’” It is on the north‐western coast of Scotland, however, that the greatest abundance of these mollusca occurs, and there they form not a luxury but even a necessary of life to the poor semi‐barbarous population. The inhabitants of these rocky regions enjoy an unenviable notoriety for being habitually dependent on this mean diet. “Where the river meets the sea at Tongue,” says Macculloch, in his “Highland and Island Homes of Scotland,” “there is a considerable ebb, and the long sandbanks are productive of cockles in an abundance which is almost unexampled. At that time (a year of scarcity) they presented every day at low water a singular spectacle, being crowded with men, women, and children, who were busily digging for these shell fish as long as the tide permitted. It was not unusual to see thirty or forty horses from the surrounding country, which had been brought down for the purpose of carrying away loads of them to distances of many miles. This was a well‐known season of scarcity, and, without this resource, I believe it is not too much to say that many individuals must have died for want.” One of the easiest forms of collecting is from the _débris_, as it were, of fishermen’s nets and baskets; but it is exceedingly difficult to induce trawlers to bring home any of their “rubbish.” Money, that in general “makes the mare to go” in any direction you wish, seems to have lost its stimulating power when the duty to be performed, the _quid pro quo_, is the putting a shovelful of “rubbish” into a bucket of water instead of jerking it overboard. No, they haven’t got time. You try to work on their friendship; you sit and chat with them, and think you have succeeded in worming yourself into their good graces sufficiently to induce them to undertake the not very onerous task of bringing in a tub of “rubbish.”