THE CEPHALOPODS. 103 



internal shells ; and their animals to have had the power 

 of rising from the bottom, and of sailing on the surface of 

 their native seas. Their remains swarm in the secondary 

 calcareous strata, some of them not larger than a bean, 

 while others equal a small chariot-wheel in size ; and being 

 subject to many variations in the form of their spires, na- 

 turalists have availed themselves of these as the means of 

 collecting them into small groups for accurate examination. 

 But in this tendency to variety, they probably yield to the 

 genus which follows, the Camerines of Bruguiere or Num- 

 mulites of Lamarck, fossils, distinguished some of them by 

 their lenticular shape, without any perceptible external aper- 

 ture, while the inner spiral cavity is divided by septa into an 

 infinity of little chambers, which do not communicate to- 

 gether by means of a syphon, as is the case in the Belemnites 

 and Ammonites. The patient and laborious researches 

 undertaken successively by Bianchi, Soldani, Fichtel and 

 Moll, and Ale. d'Orbigny, have discovered an astonishing 

 number of chambered shells which, like the Nummulites, 

 have no siphon communicating between the chambers, and 

 which are extremely small, often indeed invisible, excepting 

 through the microscope. They vary, too, very remarkably in 

 their figure, their armature and sculpture, and in the num- 

 ber and relative position of their chambers. Most of them 

 are found in a fossil state in the sandy strata of many coun- 

 tries ; but a considerable number are recent, living in the 

 sea among sand, sea-weed, or corallines. Of one or two of 

 these the animal has been examined, and it appears to have 

 a little oblong body crowned by many reddish tentacula 

 an observation which, joined to the chambered structure of 

 the shell, has caused them to be arranged as a family among 

 the Cephalopods ; but the classification cannot be regarded 

 as settled until further investigations have more accurately 

 informed us on their anatomy ; and some late observers have 

 not hesitated to assert that the inhabitants of these shells 

 are either worms allied to the serpulae, or rather, as Dujardin 

 has proved in relation to many of them, not superior in 

 organization to infusorial animalcules.* 



of the cells or chambers, are not roundish and with an even edge, as those of 

 the Orthoceros and Nautilus, but are slashed or jagged, into processes or 

 appendages, which, laid together, tally and close into one another so strongly 

 and curiously, that, when joined, the flats or surfaces of the whole Ammonis 

 are embellished with a beautiful leaved work, exactly similar to that on the 

 skulls of animals : and this by fossilologists is called the foliaceous sutures 

 of the Ammonites." DA COSTA'S Elem. ]62. 

 * Ann. des Sc. Nut. iv. 343. Dec. 1835. 



