Despite these devices, the dearth of fishing-tackle among the Seri is evidently extreme. Save in the single specimen figured, no piscatorial apparatus of any sort was found among the squalid but protean possessions at the Costa Rica rancheria; neither nets nor hooks nor rods nor lines nor any other device suitable for taking the finny game were found in the scores of jacales containing other artifacts on Tiburon; while Señor Encinas was conversant only with the simple method of taking fish by hand from the pools and shallows left by receding breakers or ebbing tides. This dearth of devices is significantly harmonious with other Seri characteristics: it accords with the leading place assigned the turtle in their industry and their lore; it is in harmony with that primitive and nonmechanical instinct which leads them to rely on bodily strength and skill and swiftness rather than on extra-corporeal artifacts in their crude and incomplete conquest of nature; and it is a manifest expression of relation with their distinctive physical environment—for the ever-thundering breakers of their gale-swept coast are abundant, albeit capricious, bringers of living grist, while the offshore gales at low tide lay bare hundreds of acres of shoaler bottoms literally writhing with fishes stranded among beds of mollusks and slimy with the abounding plankton of a fecund coast. The region is one of ample, albeit lowly, food supply, where every experience tends toward inert reliance on providential chance, and where the stimulus of consistently conscious necessity seldom stirs the inventive faculty. * * * * * Closely connected with fish as a Seri food-source are the various molluscan and crustacean forms collectively called shellfish; and these contribute a considerable share of the sustenance of the tribe. Apparently the most important constituent of this class of foods is the Pacific coast clam, which abounds in the broad mud-flats bordering Laguna La Cruz and other lagoons of Seriland, and which was still more abundant during a subrecent geologic epoch, to judge from the immense accumulation of the shells in Punta Antigualla. The clams are usually taken at low tide, without specialized apparatus. They are located by feeling with the feet in shallow water, and caught either with toes or with fingers, to be tossed into any convenient receptacle. When the water is entirely withdrawn from the flats, they are located by means of their holes, and are extricated either with a shell-cup or with some other improvised implement. Frequently the entire mess is thrown into a fire until the shells open, when they are withdrawn and the mollusks devoured practically raw; perhaps more commonly the shells are opened by blows of the hupf, and eaten without semblance of cooking; and, except on the surface, no trace of roasting was found among the vast accumulations of shells in Punta Antigualla.