IN A SNAILERY. ME 
—more productive than continents, and at the same time 
liable to be deficient in enemies to snails. 
How has this curious distribution come to pass? How 
have seemingly impassable barriers been overcome, so that 
closely related forms are now found at the antipodes? 
Snails are of domestic tastes. ‘The Heathen painted be- 
fore the modest women’s doors Venus sitting upon a snail, 
que domi forta vocatur, called a House bearer, to teach 
them to stay at home, and to carry their houses about with 
them.” They are also slow of pace, as a list of poets are 
ready to stand up and testify; but they have had a long 
time in which to “ get a good ready,” first to start, and af- 
terward to accomplish their travels, since their existence as 
arace goes back to when dark forests of ferns waved their 
heavy fronds over the inky paleeozoic bogs. Distance dis- 
appears in the presence of such prodigious time. Lands 
like our western plains, now an arid waste impassable to 
mollusks, in by- gone ages were clothed with dense and 
limitless verdure, where every form of terrestrial life 
abounded. Between the present and even the laying down 
of those eretaceous sandstones that make the soil of our 
level plains, the Rocky Mountains have been elevated from 
an altitude at which any. mollusk could probably have lived 
upon their summits, until now they may be a barrier to 
