194 THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS 



he has already said in another. He is fond of digression, 

 and whatever the matter in hand, chance remarks on a 

 variety of subjects are to be expected. If the references 

 were lost, one would hardly look in the chapter on 

 the hive-bee for the two passages next cited. 



All animals, he says, even man himself, proceed from 

 ^> eggs. In another place he speaks confidently about 

 mammalian eggs, though such things were not actually 

 demonstrated before the nineteenth century. 



A chance mention of the egg-masses of the lackey- 

 moth leads him to say that though such eggs might be 

 expected as a matter of course to yield caterpillars, they 

 sometimes yield flies instead, which he considers the 

 most surprising fact in natural history. This must be a 

 very early mention (perhaps the very first) of egg- 

 parasites. 



The Snail and other Mollusks 



Swammerdam takes the apple- snail (Helix pomatia) 

 as his first example of a mollusk.^ He remarks that 

 this species was a pest to the wine-growers of France ; 

 in Holland, however, it was a curiosity, with which 

 people liked to furnish their grottos, and he thinks 

 it worth while to explain how they can be most readily 

 imported. Then he describes and figures the shell ; 

 unfortunately, this and some other figures of snails have 

 been reversed by the engraver. He calls it an operculate 

 shell, though he knew that the so-called operculum 

 is only to be found in winter. The uses of snails as 

 food and medicine are noted. They are, he thinks, 

 a kind of insect, and he places them in his first order of 

 insects, viz. such as undergo no transformation ; else- 

 where he speaks of " Scarabaei et alia Testacea."^ The 



^BiUia Naturoe, p. 97. ^B.N., p. 197. 



