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snail may be taking a mid-day nap (Helix arbustorum). 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 
Adowa-leaves, which to them is a forest of mystery and safety. 
Those leaves of the Adozwa, 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 phosphorescent, 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 hollow 
is a whole colony of H. rotwndata—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 (7/™- 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, 1. 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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