2 os Oh 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 65 
aimount, that the dredge, after five minutes’ scrape, 
will sometimes come up choked full of this great 
cockle only. You will see hundreds of them in 
every cove for miles this day; a seeming waste 
of life, which would be awful in our eyes, were 
not the Divine Ruler, as His custom is, making 
this destruction the means of fresh creation, by 
burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on 
shore, to fertilize the strata of some future world. 
It is but a shell-fish truly; but the great Cuvier 
thought it remarkable enough to devote to its ana- 
tomy elaborate descriptions and drawings, which 
have done more perhaps than any others to illus- 
trate the curious economy of the whole class of 
bivalve, or double-shelled, mollusca. (Plate IT. 
Fig. 3.) 
That red capsicum is the foot of the animal 
contained in the cockle-shell. By its aid it crawls, 
leaps, and burrows in the sand, where it lies 
drinking in the salt water through one of its 
_ siphons, and discharging it again through the other. 
Put the shell into a rock pool, or a basin of water, 
F 
