66 CONCHOLOGIST’S COMPANION. 
and high colouring of their surfaces. Ancient poets 
were not inattentive to their merit. They fabled that 
Venus selected one of the most beautiful for the car, 
that bore her in‘triumph to the shores of Paphros ; 
and a modern writer, improving on this idea, has 
thus elegantly described the heroine of his tale :— 
E’en as the blue enamoured waves, when first 
The sea-born goddess, in her rosy shell, 
Sailed the calm ocean. Martyr of Antioch. 
Different species of the same interesting genus are 
used, in both hemispheres, for purposes of decoration. 
«« And oft a scattered ornament bestow 
The tinctur’d rivals of the showery bow.” 
The females of the North-American Indians, 
especially, cover with them the shoes which they 
use in dancing, and thus produce a sound somewhat 
resembling the tinkling of the little bells that were 
worn on similar occasions by the Jewish ladies: a 
mode of decoration noticed and reprehended by 
Isaiah, in his energetic admonition to the unthinking 
daughters of Zion, that the Lord would take away 
‘the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their 
feet, and their cauls and round tires like the moon,” 
because of their haughtiness, and their forgetfulness 
of him.—Isaiah 1. 16, 18. 
Little is known, with certainty, respecting the 
