THE NAUTILUS. 



VOL. XVII. FEBRUARY, 1904. No. 10. 



SHELL COLLECTING DAYS AT FRENCHMANS' BAY. 



BY DWIGHT BLANEY. 



It is with the desire to return some of the pleasure the writer has 

 derived from the interesting accounts of collecting trips which have 

 appeared in the NAUTILUS, that the following description of a di-edg- 

 ing trip in Frenchmans' Bay, Maine, has been written: 



Taking a calm morning, with the tide nearly at low-water mark, 

 we start off in a small scow in tow of our fifty-foot steamer. A calm 

 day is to be preferred, as the labor is much reduced, a rough sea 

 making it very uncomfortable in the pitching scow. 



The scow is fitted with seats, and gives us plenty of room to coil 

 the 100 fathoms of rope, places for pails, tubs and sieves, with safe 

 corners for glass jars of sea water. We usually dredge in what we 

 know as good fishing-ground, as more shells are found in such places, 

 though all kinds of bottom are tried. 



The dredging stations for the day are planned beforehand and we 

 look forward with no little anticipation to the hauling up of the 

 dredge. 



We are always hoping to find alive the Pecten islandicus, Thracia 

 conradi, or the Aporrhais occidentalis* as we have only dredged dead 

 specimens before ; and the chance of adding new species to our 

 collection keeps us continually hard at work. 



To-day we try first, some hard bottom off the northern end of 

 Long Porcupine Island and the first, haul brings in about a dozen 

 fine live specimens of the large scallop, the Pecten tenuicostatus. This 



