1868.] DE SOLA — THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 447 



respecting the nature of species and the laws of organic life, and 

 have taught him to recognize in these minute organisms some of 

 the chief builders of the earth's crust, — many of its component 

 rocks being the stupendous monuments of their labors, and in 

 which they lie entombed. 



Not without interest, also, will be found the study of the shell- 

 fish, long considered the most inert and stupid of all animals. 

 " Les mollusques," wrote Virey, even within our own time, " sont 

 les pauvrcs et les affliges, parmi les 6tres de la creation; ils 

 semblent solliciter la pitie des autres animaux." On the other 

 hand, Lorenz Oken exclaims, " Surely a snail is an exalted symbol 

 of mind slumbering deeply within itself!" Shakespeare's fool hit 

 the happy medium between extremists, when he told King Lear 

 that the reason why the snail has a house, was " to put his head 

 in, not to give it away to his daughters, and have his horns 

 without a case." Lucian ridiculed the philosophers who spent 

 their lives inquiring into the soul of an oyster ; but a modern 

 writer is yet more severe on the conchologists when he says 

 " Lucian's wiseacres were respectable when compared with their 

 brethren, who care for neither an oyster's soul nor body, but con- 

 centrate their faculties in the contemplation of its shell." But 

 this writer may have forgotten that the conchologist — reversing 

 the procedure of the lawyer of the fable, who gave to his clients 

 the shells and kept the oyster to himself — may be as much war- 

 ranted in examining the waves, scales, and ribs of the shell, as is 

 another to anatomize the contained creature, which, says Lentitius, 

 " animal est aspectu et horridum et nauseosam, sive ad spectes in 

 sua concha clausum," etc. Without claiming too much for the 

 shell fish, we may assert that the student will find them possessing 

 quite a sufficiency of acuteness and sensibility, and their in- 

 stinctive proceedings are often very surprising. Some of these 

 proceedings of mollusks, it is true, we are not always inclined to 

 admire; for instance, those of the Teredo, or ship-worm, that 

 terrible destroyer of ships, landing-piers, and dockyards ; though, 

 perhaps, he may consider he is only offering just retaliation for 

 man's unceasing warfare against his cousins — the oysters. I 

 may not stay to take a more particular view of the mollusks, but 

 will proceed to notice a few points of interest in the study of the 

 vegetable kingdom. 



About a century and a quarter ago, Linnaeus declared the 

 number of the different kinds of plants to be 5,938. Half a 



