BUCCINUM. 1T1 



on the iishermeii's hooks. Orsted tells lis, in his interesting 

 treatise ' De regionibus marinis,' that great numbers of B. un- 

 datum and Futms antiquu)< are collected in the Cattcgat for fish- 

 bait, by pntting a dead cod into a wicker basket and letting it 

 down on a muddy bottom ; it is soon taken up half-filled with 

 whelks. The same method is adopted for their capture on the 

 English and Irish coasts. The whelk aflfords 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. iindatum ex- 

 tracted 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 indige- 

 nous taste ; for when the Romans were in this countiy, they 

 seem to have acquired it — being one which they could not gratify 

 in Italv. Shells of B. undatum, mixed with those of the oyster, 

 have been noticed among the ruins of a Roman station at Rich- 

 borough. At the enthronization feast of William Warham, 

 Archbishop of Canterburj^, on the 9th of March, 1504, there 

 were provided ' 8000 whelks at 5s. per 1000.' In the shell-fish 

 market at Billingsgate 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, sa3^s, ' 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 dis- 

 posed 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' Corallines 

 "as ' Alcyoniivm mu Veaicidaria marina of Bauhin ;' they are 

 23 



