THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 39 



been put. It is the gigantic Tridacna, commonly known 

 as the " holy-water pot/' because it is sometimes employed 

 in churches to contain the consecrated water. But those 

 which we see are far from giving us an idea of the animal. 

 The great Tridacnge, which can only be detached from the 

 rocks by cutting the fibrous mass that fastens them with 

 an axe, sometimes weigh more than five hundred pounds. 

 In the archipelago of the Molucca Islands these concholog- 

 ical giants are not rare. The natives eat them like our 

 oysters, to which they are analogous, and the flesh of one 

 is a sufficient meal for twenty people. Their thick valves, 

 which are sometimes five feet long, serve as troughs for the 

 inhabitants, presented by nature ready cut and polished, 

 and which, according to Peron, they often use for feeding 

 pigs and other animals. Sometimes also they convert them 

 into baths for their children. 



Some of those fossil shells, so well known under the 

 name of ammonites, were of even more gigantic propor- 

 tions. Buffon speaks of one, the diameter of which was 

 equal to that of a carriage-wheel, and which was used for 

 a millstone. 



Finally, if the abysses of the sea do not harbor the mon- 

 sters with which the imagination of some chroniclers has 

 peopled them, we certainly sometimes discover in the ocean 

 molluscs of prodigious dimensions, the fleshy mass of which 

 is not less than from sixteen to twenty feet in length, with- 

 out reckoning the arms which crown the head. Such was 

 the cuttle-fish (Sepia) which the steamer Alecton met in 

 1861 between Madeira and the Canary Islands. Its weight 

 was estimated at 4414 Ibs. avoirdupois, but the crew could 



