64 GLAUCUS ; OR, 



is close-set to its fellow, and curved at the point 

 transversely to the shell, the whole being thus 

 horrid with hundreds of strong tenterhooks, mak- 

 ing his castle impregnable to the raveners of 

 the deep. For we can hardly doubt that these 

 prickles are meant as weapons of defence, 

 without which so savory a morsel as the mol- 

 lusk within (cooked and eaten largely on some 

 pai'ts of our south coast) would be a staple ar- 

 ticle of food for sea beasts of prey. And it is 

 noteworthy, first, that the defensive thorns, which 

 are permanent on the two thinner species, acu- 

 leatum and echinatum, disappear altogether on 

 the thicker one, tuhercidatum, as old age gives 

 him a solid and heavy globose shell; and next, 

 that he too, while young and tender, and liable 

 therefore to be bored through by whelks and 

 such murderous univalves, does actually possess 

 the same brier-prickles which his thinner cousins 

 keep throughout life. Nevertheless, (and this 

 is a curious fact, which makes, like most other 

 facts, pretty strongly against the transmutation of 

 species, and the production of organs by circum- 

 stances demanding them,) prickles, in all three 

 species, are, as far as we can see, useless in Torbay, 

 where no seal or wolf-fish, (AnarrMchas lupus,) 



