Red Sea Shells. 21 



will of the animal. The peculiar species of " watering pot" I have 

 shown you protects its siphons by means of a calcareous tube, at 

 the upper end of which is always one, and sometimes as many 

 as three ruffles. Mine has two, with the rudiment of a third. The 

 broken specimen 1 found near Suez had three beautifully de- 

 veloped frills. These are manifestly formed by the siphonal 

 orifices, as the animal continues elongating, after it has fixed its 

 valves and ceased to burrow, or perhaps when it is compelled by 

 the accumulation of sediment to lengthen its tube upwards. 

 There is no little analogy between the habits of the razors and 

 piddocks of our own shores and those of these rarer molluscs from 

 the Red Sea and Japan ; but 1 have said enough to prove the 

 oddity of the creature, which was what I started with affirming. 



I must not close this paper without alluding to one little shell 

 for which I have a great affection, partly because I used to think 

 as a child that to find a real live one would be a fortune in itself, 

 and partly because, as far as I know, it is one of the peculiar 

 treasures of Bahr Akaba — I mean the strawberry trochus, or 

 Pharaoh's tooth, which I am told is now called Clanculus. After 

 searching in vain for my favourite for some lime, I at last picked 

 up one that had fallen a victim to some stromb or whelk. Terrible 

 vandals are the whelks with their rasp-like tongue ribbon. When 

 I reached Akaba, 1 showed the perforated shell to the Arab lads 

 who hung about my tents, and offered " backsheesh" for any that 

 were " teieb." After that 1 had no lack: and in a stroll I took 

 one evening down the Mecca shore, 1 came upon a whole shoal of 

 them crawling over the seaweed-covered rocks. All trochuses are 

 vegetable feeders, and should be sought for more or less close to 

 the edge of the tide ; but of all the one hundred and fifty species 

 that exist I do not know of one that can rival the beaded beauty 

 of " Monodonta Pharaonis." 



Well, gentlemen, it is time we left the sea shore, though I 

 assure you, now I have once got back to it again, I find it very 

 hard to tear myself away : what with the shells, and the heaps 

 of red and white coral, the madrapores and the sponges, the 

 gorgeously painted fish that lay basking in the clear pools ; the 

 showers of silver fry that played like watersquibs over the 

 surface of the quiet sea, pursued, I suppose, by some finny foe ; 

 the rocks of red and yellow sandstone, that sometimes all but 

 barred our path ; the sunsets that drenched the mountains of the 

 Mecca shore with floods of crimson such as I have never seen 

 elsewhere ; the cool stillness of evening, with Orion and the 

 Pleiads caught in the shining gossamer of the Zodiacal light — all 

 this, and much more, makes me wish myself back beside Bahr 

 Akaba again. Whether or no I have been able to interest ray 



