228 THE STEUCTURE AND 



one-third of an inch in diameter at one end, and gra- 

 dually tapering to one-fifth of an inch at the other, 

 whence it abruptly terminated in a short cone, perfo- 

 rated in the centre. The whole length was an inch and 

 a half, and its texture was that of an elegant mosaic, 

 composed of grains of fine sand of various colours, and 

 excessively minute fragments of shell, agglutinated 

 together so as to be pretty strong, though not more 

 than one grain thick. It was only with a lens that 

 this structure could be seen ; to the naked eye it 

 seemed an uniform substance, slightly rough, and of 

 a pale red hue, dotted with black. 



On looking into the larger end of this tube, I could 

 see what looked like a stopper of white flesh, exactly 

 fitting the calibre, and moving up and down in the 

 tube like a piston. Occasionally it was protruded a 

 little beyond the edge, when its extremity was seen to 

 be truncate, or, as it were, cut straight off, so that it 

 was just like a cork that moves freely up and down in 

 the neck of a bottle. But from the smnmit of this 

 fleshy cork two organs were projecting, each of which 

 exactly resembled a lady's hach comh^ the teeth being 

 curved in the same manner ; only we must suppose 

 them to be bevelled off on each side, the central teeth 

 of each comb being much the longest ; their sm'face 

 is highly metallic, reflecting the light exactly like 

 burnished gold. These two combs are placed side by 

 side (or edge to edge), so that together they extend 

 nearly all across the flat end of the " corh y" not, how- 

 ever, in a straight, but an angled line, so as to cut off 

 about 120^, or one-third of the circle. 



When the creature had overcome in some degree 



