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snail may be taking a mid-day nap (Helix arbtistoruTn). Its 

 richly mottled, brown shell, the clear porcelain-white of its outer 

 lip, and deep blue-black of the animal itself make it an object of 

 interest and some beauty. 



See ! what a busy region we disturb when we lift this stone ! 

 Half-a-dozen scarlet-bodied spiderets, " soldiers," scampering 

 away in most unmilitary haste to hide under crumbs of brown 

 earth ; here a grey-brownish slug, there a jet black one, larger 

 and fatter, put out first one and then another tentacle, resenting 

 the intrusion on their slumber, while you wonder how such big, 

 soft animals can lie, to say nothing of sleeping, under a mass of 

 stone like this. Beetles, black and dusky brown, flashed with 

 prismatic green, scuttle off at a break-neck pace out and over the 

 rough hollows and hillocks made by the stone, and begin a 

 vigorous exploration of the closely woven covert of grasses and 

 Adoxa-leaxes, which to them is a forest of mystery and safety. 

 Those leaves of the Adoxa, and, still more, its root will repay 

 your study. Those white roundish cocoon-like things are spiders' 

 nests ; these pellucid globules, for all the world like single grains 

 of boiled tapioca, are the egg-nuclei of snails. Pocket them care- 

 fully, you may find they are phospliorescent, and it is yet a moot 

 point what species have and have not phosphorescent eggs. 

 Under the driest part of the root-entangled edges of our liollow 

 is a whole colony of //. rotundata — one of our very commonest 

 land shells, but also one of the most beautifully sculptured. 

 Close behind these, half hid by a drooping frondlet of a lovely, 

 and also common, moss (Th^- tamariscinum), is the brilliant 

 banded shell of H. hortensis, the shell whose countless variations 

 and likeness to Helix nemoralis cause so much discussion amongst 

 persons who prefer to disintegrate genera rather than unite 

 species. One broad distinction between the two shells, whether 

 species or not, is easy to bear in mind — the wood snail, //. nemor- 

 alis, has the outer lip dark chocolate-brown, almost black, while 

 in H. hortensis the lip is usually white. Searching more narrowly 

 into the crevices of this earthy hollow, you will perhaps discover 

 that those minute gleamings of silvery opalescence, mixed up with 

 the crumbling earth, are, when you isolate them, two other species 

 of Zonites : crystallinus and purus ; the former one of the very 

 loveliest of our land-shells, its tiny tenant's body being nearly as 

 translucent as its house, which is aptly likened to crystal. 

 Another pretty and generally-distributed little mollusk is likely 



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