68 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 



to powder they effected wondrous cures; in the 

 mouth of the dead they gave light to the soul ; they 

 became emblems of purity and constancy. 



All over the world some use or other seems to 

 have been made of cowrie shells, and in many cases 

 at least there was a cowrie symbolism. Perforated 

 cowries are found associated with the early Cro- 

 Magnon men and with pre-dynastic burials in 

 Egypt; and they were used as money in China 

 more than seven centuries B.C. Now, cowries 

 are very beautiful shells, they are also very handy 

 for money, tokens, messages, eyes for mummies, 

 dice, balloting, and so forth; but there are strong 

 reasons for believing (with Mr. Wilfrid Jackson 

 and Professor Elliot Smith) that the grip they have 

 taken of mankind has owed a great part of its 

 tenacity to sex-symbolism suggested to the many 

 by the shell's shape, and to the few by the way the 

 living animal, expanding itself in the shore-pool, 

 seemed to be born, as it were, from within the shell. 

 There was no manual of the common objects of 

 the seashore in those days, and to the impressionable 

 it was a queer thing to see a rampant, horned and 

 hungry creature slowly divulge itself. Moreover, 

 were not these big shells exposed only at the lowest 

 tides, so that from Mandalay to Mexico they were 

 somehow linked to the moon, and thus again to 

 women? We cannot help fancying that some of 

 the early observers, in days long before Aristotle's 

 illuminating insight, must have seen hermit-crabs 

 coming half out of whelk shells and jerking back 



