23 



LETTER III. 



THE MOLLUSCA CONSIDERED AS EDIBLE ANIMALS. 



You may often have heard it observed that living beings 

 form an uninterrupted chain, 



" lessening down 



From Infinite Perfection to the brink 

 Of dreary nothing," 



from which no link can be removed without disordering the 

 uniformity of the whole. The comparison, in whichever way 

 applied, is not altogether correct ; for there are yet at least 

 many evident breaks to the continuity of animals, many in- 

 completed or absent circles in the scheme of their quinary 

 involutions, whether we look to their external appearance or 

 internal organization. If the simile is intended merely as an 

 illustration of their dependence upon one another for the sup- 

 ply of some necessary want, it is still liable to exception, for 

 there can be no doubt that many species of the Mollusca in 

 particular, which have lived under the present state of things, 

 have been lost and exterminated, while others their contem- 

 poraries survive to play their part among living entities. 

 You must therefore receive with many limitations the lan- 

 guage of some writers, who love to declaim upon the possible 

 effects of the annihilation of even the most insignificant spe- 

 cies. It might involve, they say, the destruction of some 

 other immediately dependent on it for its wants ; the exter- 

 mination of this again would be but the precursor of another's 

 death ; another still would succeed, and ruin would spread 

 around, until man himself fell in its embrace. Impressed 

 with this view, which is a very popular one, a poet and 

 naturalist has said, 



" Each shell, each crawling insect holds a rank 

 Important in the plan of Him, who fram'd 

 This scale of heings ; holds a rank, which lost 

 Would break the chain, and leave behind a gap 

 Which Nature's self would rue."* 



* Stillingfleet's Select Works, ii. i. 46. See Cuvier's remarks on this 

 subject in his Hist, des Sc. Nat. iii. p. 54, &c. ; and Miller's Old Red Sand- 

 stone, p. 66. 



