408 Natural History of Mollusccus Animals : — 



To this day a roast pigeon is occasionally served up at the 

 table of sharpers, as emblematical of the profession. Fifty 

 or sixty years ago, it was customary to cast off a carrier pigeon 

 at Tyburn, immediately that a criminal was turned off, in 

 order to give the earliest information of the event to the 

 surviving relatives. 



Art. III. An Introduction to the Natural History of Molluscous 

 Animals. In a Series of Letters. By G. J. 



Letter 14. On their Food and Digestive Organs: Carnivorous 



Mollusca. 



Although it may be true, as stated in the preceding letter, 

 [p. 218 — 224.], that the great proportion of the Conchifera 

 Subsist on food in a state of molecular division, yet there can 

 be no doubt that some of the larger and locomotive species 

 seek a more substantial fare, and feed on worms or other 

 animal matter in a state of partial decay ; which they seem to 

 have the power of grasping by means of their extensible 

 labial appendages. Thus the large Cyprina islandica and the 

 Modiola vulgaris of our seas very often swallow the bait of 

 our fishermen, and in the stomach of an individual of the 

 former I once found the undigested remains of a large green 

 Nereis enveloped in a pulp too consistent certainly to have 

 been the sediment from water, however loaded with molecules. 

 In their manner of feeding, these Conchifera resemble the 

 pectinibranchial g2is\.Gro}^odiQS whose shells have a notch or canal 

 at the base of their apertures ; and it is important you should 

 remember that it is only, with a few exceptions, the gastero- 

 podes of this order (Pectinibranchia) so circumstanced that 

 are truly carnivorous. They embrace the Cyprae^wf/t?, the 

 cones, the volutes, the rock shells and the whelks, all of 

 which live on animal food, and it seems to be indifferent to 

 them whether their prey is dead, or still fresh and alive ; but, in 

 the latter case, it is obvious, if you remember the inactivity, 

 and sluggishness, and total want of cunning, of these molluscs, 

 that the prey they can master must be fettered and stationary, 

 or endowed with locomotive powers and arms not superior to 

 their own. It is not unlikely that they may prefer a dead 

 prey to a living one, for we know that the whelks will take a 

 bait readily, and they frequently enter the baskets laid for 

 crabs and lobsters, which are always baited with garbage ; 

 while in tropical climes we are told that they fish for the olives 

 with lines, to which small nooses, each containing a piece of 

 the arms of a cuttlefish, are appended. 



