THE COMMON SNAIL. 19 



several others. The Helicidce, or Helix family, is that which 

 includes the land shell Snails and the naked Slugs, and in 

 this family there are several genera; they are distinguished 

 from the shelled water Snails, both sea and river, by having 

 a different breathing apparatus, and some othe-r points of 

 internal construction which it is not necessary to describe 

 here. 



The Common Snail has a mouth, of which it makes good 

 use, as market gardeners well know, and yet this mouth is 

 not furnished with teeth ; instead of these, the upper lip, which 

 is of a horny texture, is what is called dentated, from the 

 Latin dentus — a tooth, that is, divided or separated, so as to 

 present somewhat the appearance of a row of teeth in the 

 jaw; this lip is of an arched form, and appears to be a very 

 serviceable kind of instrument to Mr. Helix a-spersa, who, if 

 his character be not aspersed, is very destructive to all sorts 

 of greenery. The lower lip is divided only in the middle, 

 where there is an opening of some width: it is not horny, 

 like the upper one. 



Snails lay eggs, which are about the size of very small 

 peas; thej^ are soft, and of a whitish colour. Being semi, 

 that is, half, transparent, or clear, their contents can be partly 

 seen; and in those of a water Snail, deposited against the side 

 of a glass bottle, the young were detected with partially 

 formed shells upon their backs. 



To shew how tenacious they are of life, it has been men- 

 tioned that Mr. S. Simon, a Dublin merchant, had a collection 

 of fossils and other curiosities left him by his father; among 

 these were some shells of Snails, and fifteen years after the 

 collection came into his possession, his son had the shells to 

 play with, and placed them in a basin of water, when lo! 

 out came the slimy bodies and knobbed horns of several of 

 the Gasteropods, no doubt hungry enough after their long sleep. 



We all know that our Common Snails hybernate, or sleep 

 through the winter. As soon as the chills of autumn are 

 felt, they seek out some snug cre\ice in an old wall, or burrow 

 in the earth, or congregate beneath garden pots, roots of trees, 

 thatched roofs, or in any hole or corner that may be convenient, 

 and then throwing a kind of temporary skin, like a di'um 

 head, which naturalists call operculum, over the opening of 



