190 THE WORLD OF THE ‘SEA. 
These little borers cannot but excite our wonder. Here 
are soft creatures without the slightest consistency, capable of 
hollowing out for themselves homes in the hardest rocks! Such 
is the power of life, even in its lowest development, over inanimate 
matter. 
Some of the bivalves produce a brown or golden-coloured silk, 
which forms the cable, or dyssus, by which they anchor themselves 
to the rocks. The mytilus has the byssus short and coarse; in 
the pinna it is long and silky. Attempts have been made to 
utilise this filament; indeed, the inhabitants of Taranto make 
gloves and stockings of it. Cloths of a rich brown have also 
been fabricated, which are of an admirable texture. Some 
beautiful specimens of this fabric were exhibited at the French 
Exhibition of 1855, and in that year M. J. Cloquet presented 
the Acclimatisation Society with a pair of fine mittens made 
of the byssus of the pinna. Not only does the byssus serve 
to fix the mollusks to the rock, but some of them attach by 
its means stones, pieces of coral, and other solid matters to 
themselves, thus surrounding their shells with a very invulner- 
able coat, in which they lie in ambush, waiting for their prey. 
In constructing this envelope, which is not unlike a miniature 
rockery, the mollusk, by a singular artifice, spins and weaves 
the material of its byssus. It then lines its interior with a 
species of tapestry, thrusts this outside, and mats together by 
its means the solid bodies within its reach. Thus it in turn 
plays the part of spinner, weaver, and mason. Clothed in a 
calcareous covering, or a stony mantle, buried in a rock, or 
anchored by a cable, the bivalve—the softest and the most 
delicate of creatures—can exist in a terrible and ever-turbulent 
element without injury and without inconvenience. 
The smallest of the bivalves are scarcely one-fiftieth of an inch 
long. The giants of their community, the 7ridacna gigas, are more 
than a yard wide. A very fine pair of shells of this species is 
to be seen in the church of St. Sulpice, Paris, where they hold 
the holy water. These magnificent shells were presented by the 
Venetian republic to Francis I., and in the time of Louis XIV. 
they were given to the church. Another but somewhat smaller 
