THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE, 67 
sharp and tongue-like; only flattened, not hori- 
zontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as 
to form, as it was intended, a perfect sand-plough, 
by which the animal can move at will, either above 
or below the surface of the sand.} 
But for colour and shape, to what shall we 
compare it? To polished cornelian, says Mr. Gosse. 
I say, to one of the great red capsicums which 
hang drying in every Covent-garden seedsman’s 
window. Yet is either simile better than the guess 
of a certain lady, who, entering a room wherein 
a couple of Cardium tuberculatum -were waltzing 
about a plate, exclaimed, “Oh dear! I always 
heard that my pretty red coral came out of a fish, 
and here it is all alive!” 
“C. tuberculatum,” says Mr. Gosse (who described 
it from specimens which I sent him in 1854), “is 
far the finest species. The valves are more globose 
1 If any inland reader wishes to see the action of this foot, in 
the bivalve Molluscs, let him look at the Common Pond-Mussel 
(Anodon Cygneus), which he will find in most stagnant waters, and 
see how he burrows with it in the mud, and how, when the water 
is drawn off, he walks solemnly into deeper water, leaving a furrow 
behind him. 
F 2 
