122 Chapters in Modern Botany chap. 



the like ; the majority, unfortunately for our gardens, will 

 eat almost any verdure they can find. They have large 

 appetites, able to devour an eighth part of their weight of 

 cabbage in three hours ; and as every gardener mourns, 

 they are also very abundant ; 150 have been seen around a 

 plot of but a square yard, and an industrious naturalist in 

 one day collected 1200 of a single species from a piece of 

 ground three-quarters of a mile square. 



But while snails, always excepting the "specialists," are 

 not fastidious in their diet, they draw the line somewhere. 

 Certain plants they have found do not agree with them, 

 and these they eschew. They try them, suffer for it, 

 remember their experience, and leave the disagreeable 

 plants alone for the future. 



Here then we have a problem such as a German 

 professor loves, and which no one can tackle with more 

 painstaking industry than he, — not even Darwin with his 

 sundews, — to tempt innumerable snails with all manner of 

 meats, to find out their favourite menu and their index 

 expiirgatorius of viands, and to make a theory out of it. 

 Thus Professor Stahl enumerates at least fifteen different 

 ways in which plants have become abhorrent to snails, and 

 are thereby protected. Some plants are too sour, others 

 are poisonous ; some are full of ferments, others are rich in 

 purgative oils. There may be bristling hairs which prick 

 the sole of the snail's "foot" as it creeps on the plant ; or 

 limy and flinty armature which makes eating too slow and 

 laborious even for a slug ; or sHmy secretions which prevent 

 the animals from getting a good grip ; or, best of all, the 

 tissues may contain thousands of little crystal needles which 

 stick in the lips and make them smart. 



If you chew a little piece — let it be only a little piece — 

 of the cuckoo-pint {Arum viactdatuni)^ which grows in the 

 shady corner of the wood, your tongue and lips will be 



