406 SUPPLEMENT 
as the first. The animal, warned by the danger it had escaped, 
would prefer suffering the irritating action of the salt, to the 
certainty of being taken. Then the fisherman is obliged to 
have recourse to a long iron crook, which he sinks pretty 
deeply, and drawing it out obliquely, carries away the sand 
and the solen contained in it. In some places an iron rod is 
employed for the same purpose, terminated by a conical 
button. The solens are the inhabitants of almost all known 
seas. 
The organization of the PHOLADES has scarcely any 
thing to distinguish it from that of others of the same family, 
but the particular disposition of the mantle, which is closed 
in almost its entire extent, except in front, and underneath, 
where it presents a very small and oval cleft, for the passage 
of the foot. ‘They are all marine, and inhabitants of the 
shores. It appears, however, that they can live in fresh- 
water, for Adanson tells. us that he has found them in the 
Niger, at a height to which the sea does not ascend. ‘They 
live constantly buried, with the mouth and foot under, and 
the tubes upwards, in argillaceous soils, or in calcareous stone, 
so that all their locomotion consists in mounting or descend- 
ing in their hole, that their tube may reach the water in which 
they are immersed, a little above the bottom. They probably, 
too, excavate their lodge. They are of the number of tere- 
brant, or ithophagous mollusca, which last expression, though 
almost consecrated by the usage of naturalists, is, nevertheless, 
erroneous. 
This is a convenient place to notice the opinions of writers, 
in explanation of the modes by which these animals perforate 
the substances in which they lodge. The complex denomina- 
tion of Mthophagous, which signifies stone-eating, is em- 
ployed in the natural history of several molluscous animals, 
to designate the habit which they have of living more or less 
deeply in the interior of stones and rocks, and not because 
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