LIFE-HISTORY OF THE HERB ROBERT 127 
from side to side with that deliberation and dignity 
which characterise the movements of this voracious 
molluse. 
I prodded it with the blunt end of a pencil to see 
if it would scrape it off as it retired into its shell, but 
in it went seed and ali. After an interval of another 
few minutes it came out again; the seed was still there, 
but high up one side of its body and close to the edge 
of the shell on its head side. 
I know from experiments I have made with much 
larger seeds than these that when one of them gets 
on or near the middle line of the body, which is 
perhaps non-sensitive, the snail will carry it about, 
apparently quite unconcerned, for a comparatively 
long time, and these seeds with their long clinging 
threads must be difficult ones for the creature to 
dislodge: so while it is probable that they cling to 
furry and feathery creatures, there can, I think, be 
no doubt that ants and snails occasionally help them 
on their travels. A Garden Snail, however, is not one’s 
idea of an active creature, for if it went on crawling 
without stopping for three weeks on end at its usual 
pace of about two inches a minute, it would still have 
eighty yards to do, or another whole day of twenty- 
four hours before finishing the first mile. 
There is one other unexpected way in which 
dispersal is helped after the first ejection of the seeds 
from the calyx: I have often seen them caught by 
the threads in aspider’s web. One knows well enough 
that these are not very durable; they easily get 
broken in various ways. I constantly walk into them 
myself and find bits of them sticking to my clothes 
and face, so the web may very well be the starting- 
point of a journey on the “‘ ole clo”? of a wandering 
K 
