Qum'terhj Journal of Conchology. 47 



animal is alive and in situ, with the valves gaping, may be seen in 

 constant vibration in the water, generating, by their mutual action, a 

 system of currents by which the siirface of the gills is laved, divert- 

 ing toward the mouth animalcules and other small nutritious 

 particles. 



The shell of the scallops consist almost exclusively, says Dr. W. 

 B. Carpenter, of membranous laminfe coarsely or finely coiTUgated. 

 It is composed of two very distinct layers, differing in color — and 

 also in texture and destructibility — but having essentially the same 

 structure. Traces of cellularity are sometimes discovei-able on the 

 external surface, and one species {P. nohilis) has a distinct prismatic 

 cellular layer externally. As the idea of the Corinthian capital is 

 believed to have been suggested to Callimachus, the Grecian architect, 

 by a plant of the Acanthus growing around a basket, it is quite 

 possible that the fluting of the Corinthian column may have been 

 suggested by the internal gTooving of the pecten shells. 



Aside from their physiology and the position in the order of 

 Nature occupied by the scallops, they have a place 'u\ history and 

 song ; for, " in the days when Ossian sang, the flat valves were the 

 plates, the hollow ones the drinking cups, of Fingal and his heroes." 

 The common Mediterranean scallop [Pecten Jacobceus), or St. James' 

 shell, was, during the Middle Ages, worn by pilgrims to the Holy 

 Land, and became the badge of sevei-al orders of knighthood. " When 

 the monks of the nmth century converted the fisherman of Genne- 

 serat into a Spanish warrior, they assigned him the scallop shell for 

 his ' cognizance.' " 



CONCHOLOGICAL NOTES. 



The Genealogical Import of the External Shell of Mollnsca.— 

 Mr. E. R. Lankester read a paper on this subject before the Biolo- 

 gical section of the British Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, at its meeting in Belfast, last August, in the course of which 

 he referred to what had been called the recapitulation hypothesis, 

 according to which all living things in their development present a 

 rapid series of pictures or dissolving views of their ancestors, arranged 

 in historical order. Applying this to the human race, he said that the 

 earliest commencement of a human being was a small speck of proto- 

 plasm of mucus-like consistency, such as existed in ponds. A later 

 stage exhibited him as a small sac, composed of two layers of living cor- 

 puscles, which he inherited from polyp-like ancestors, and was to-day 

 seen in polyps. Still later he was an elongated creatui-e, with slits in 



