of the Piedmontese Coast. 163 



vulus made my heart throb with recollections of home and its 

 familiar shores. 



At Spezia I had experienced great difficulty in cleaning the 

 larger whelks and Mediterranean Cone, in consequence of the 

 strength and size of the muscles which connect the soft parts of 

 the animal with the shell in the zoophagous Mollusks ; and, in 

 spite of the chloride of lime which I was obliged to use pretty 

 freely, my room was certainly not odoriferous in the sense I 

 could have wished,— to say nothing of a large and strange sort of 

 fly which was attracted by the decaying animal matter and bred 

 abundantly in the drawers of my wardrobe, which I had turned 

 into an extempore cabinet. But at Sestri I met with an ally 

 which relieved me from this nuisance : it was a small red ant, 

 that came in swarms from some secret hiding-place, and effectu- 

 ally cleaned out the shells in an incredibly short space of time. 

 It appeared to be a species of Atta, probably A. structor ; field- 

 ants being known occasionally to become domestic. Their 

 tenacity of life was surprising. I wished to bring home a couple 

 of specimens for an entomological friend, and put them in 

 boiling-water for several minutes ; but some time afterwards the 

 specimens (which I had dried and kept in a small box with a 

 glass lid) were as lively as ever, and seemed not to be at all the 

 worse for being parboiled. 



The excessive saltness of the Mediterranean appeared to me 

 evidenced at Sestri by the thick crust of salt-crystals which was 

 formed on the rocks by evaporation from the sea-spray. I never 

 noticed this on any part of the British coast. Lieutenant Maury, 

 in his ' Physical Geography of the Sea,^ states positively (§ 252) 

 that the Mediterranean sea is not salting up ; but the analysis 

 of Dr. Wollaston would seem to lead to an opposite conclusion. 



While engaged in my work of sifting sea-weeds and picking 

 out the shells, I could not help reflecting on the immense loss 

 of animal life which is (perhaps innocuously as well as unthink- 

 ingly) caused by naturalists. I found on my return to England 

 that 1 had brought home with me upwards of 13,000 specimens 

 of marine Testacea, and several thousands of land and freshwater 

 shells, besides sponges and zoophytes ! Of a species of Rissoaj 

 which 1 have now described and figured for the first time under 

 the name of contorta (an analogue of our Rissoa striata), 1 took 

 between 1100 and 1200 specimens ! These numbers are of 

 course exclusive of multitudes which were thrown away, as I 

 neither cared nor had time for collecting more. This wholesale 

 destruction of life is on first consideration startling ; but I con- 

 soled myself with thinking that if I had not taken and destroyed 

 these animals for scientific purposes, some of their natural 

 enemies would have made another use of them, and that if even 



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