2o6 THE DISPERSAL OF SHELLS. 



and he knew the shells of the country pretty well. 

 Had I ever seen it? I told him I had, rather ! and I 

 told him and the native the mischief they would do, 

 and the intruder, being condemned to death, was 

 promptly " crunched " under my foot. Then came the 

 question, how got it there ? I told Wright how it got 

 to the Cape, and went off in a spirit of inquiry (sea- 

 soned with diplomacy) to Mons. Luguier the French 

 chief official, or Resident as he is called ; a little 

 manoeuvring brought round the question, did he like 

 escargots ? " Ah, yes ! " and he had lately had a stroke 

 of luck ; a French man-of-war had called in and given 

 him a nice lot of them ; he had eaten the large ones 

 and had distributed the small ones about the place, and 

 when they grew bigger and had large families, he would 

 always have a dish at command. So thus the introduc- 

 tion of the pest into two widely remote countries is 

 most distinctly traced to French men-of-war." 



Slugs. 



The naked molluscs, as Mr. Hedley remarks to me, 

 seem to have roamed further and faster than shell- 

 snails ; in their race to the antipodes, at leasts as recently 

 pointed out by him, European kinds "have far out- 

 stripped their shell-bearing relatives," ^ and this is cer- 

 tainly a surprising result, for, as we have seen, the 

 creatures clearly seem less fitted than snails for acci- 

 dental dispersal under nature. In all probability, how- 



* C. Hedley, "Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.," (6), ix. (1S92), p. 170, 



