THE CULT OF SHELLS 63 



of the impact which they made long ago on the 

 mental framework of our ancestors? The child 

 holds the shell to its ear, and listens to the supposed 

 reverberation of the sea. What it hears is the 

 sympathetic resonance of vibrations selected by the 

 shell from the outside aerial turmoil, though some 

 say a little is due to the internal vibrations of 

 pulsing blood-vessel and tensely-strung muscle. 

 But we wonder whether there may not be in the 

 familiar childish experience some echoing recapitu- 

 lation of a very old, very widespread, racial custom. 

 For the cult of shells goes back to remote antiquity, 

 and for millennia simple peoples listened to the voice 

 of God in the sea-snail's shell. 



Of the great interest of shells to students of 

 human history we have had a recent revelation in 

 Mr. Wilfrid Jackson's learned work on Shells as 

 Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture 

 (1917), one of the ethnological publications of the 

 University of Manchester. To this memoir Pro- 

 fessor Elliot Smith contributes a luminous introduc- 

 tory essay, which helps us to understand the grip 

 which shells took of human nature in the days of its 

 impressionable youth. A new light is also thrown, 

 as he says, on the curiously logical sequence of 

 Father O'Flynn's intellectual achievements 



Down from mythology into thayology, 

 Troth! and conchology, if he'd the call. 



In many cases, as it seems to us, where living 

 creatures or their products have strongly gripped 

 mankind, there have been three factors at work 



