146 BUCCINIDA. 
coasts. The whelk affords an illustration of the lex talionis ; fishes 
in their turn devour it with equal greediness. I have seen 
between thirty and forty shells of B. undatum extracted from the 
stomach of a single cod. After the shell has been cleared out 
and ejected by the fish, it makes a convenient habitation for the 
hermit-crab. Other nations have not quite so great a fancy as 
ours for eating the whelk ; perhaps it is an indigenous taste ; for 
when the Romans were in this country, they seem to have 
acquired it—being one which they could not gratify in Italy. 
Shells of B. undatum, mixed with those of the oyster, have been 
noticed among the ruins of a Roman station at Richborough. 
At the enthronization feast of William Warham, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, on the 9th of March, 1504, there were provided 
‘8000 whelks at 5s. per 1000.’ Inthe shell-fish market at Billings- 
gate the present species goes by the name of the ‘white’ or 
‘common’ whelk, in contradistinction to Fusus antiquus, which 
is there called the ‘red’ or ‘almond’ whelk. My obliging 
informant, Mr. Baxter, says, ‘ Wilks must be sold the same day 
we receive them at market in the summer, being the day after 
they are caught; if the supply is greater than the demand, we 
boil them, and they keep good for several days.’ Evidence was 
given before a select committee of the House of Commons in 
the session of 1866, on the ‘Whitstable oyster-fishery extension 
Bill, that the whelk-fishery on a sandy flat in that bay yielded 
£12,000 a year—part of the produce being disposed of in the 
London market for food, and the rest sent to the cod-fishing 
banks for bait. They are seldom eaten in the northern part of 
our Isles. At Dieppe and Nantes they may occasionally be 
seen exposed for sale in the fish-markets. The embryology of 
B. undatum has been investigated by Baster and many other 
writers. Its curious spawn-cells are figured in Ellis’s Corallines 
as ‘Alcyonium seu Vesicularia marina of Bauhin;’ they are 
also called ‘Sea wash-balls,’ because of their being used instead 
of soap by sailors to wash their hands (xvii, 4). Dr. Johnston 
compares this vesicular mass to the nest of the bumble-bee. It 
is composed of numerous cartilaginous pouches, of the shape 
and size of a large split pea, piled irregularly one upon another, 
and attached by their edges at the base. Cailliaud counted 544 
of these cells in one of the spawn-masses. Each cell contains 
at first several hundred eggs, which are afterwards so greatly 
reduced in number that only trom fifteen to thirty fry come to 
maturity. The process by which this reduction takes place has 
been disputed by Scandinavian and English physiologists, not 
less as to Buccinum than with respect to Purpura. Koren and 
Danielssen state that the eggs are first spherical, that they after- 
wards separate into distinct portions, and then amalgamate or 
agglomerate and assume a different shape. Sir John Lubbock, 

