378 • PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1 669. 



in it, you may see light through it, and then it is of a yellowish colour. These 

 shells are extremely brittle and tender. 



Of the second sort I send you half a dozen. They seem to be much stronger 

 and thicker shelled ; they are nearly half as long again as the other, and as 

 slender; they have the exact figure of oaten corn, being as it were pointed at 

 both ends, and the middle a little swelled. The aperture of the shell is not 

 exactly round, there being a peculiar sinus in the lower part of it. I think you 

 may reckon about i spires, having their turn from the right hand to the left. 

 The colour of the shell is of a dark and reddish brown. 



When the snails creep, they lift up the point of their shells to a perpendicular, 

 and extend with part of their body two pair of horns, as do most of their kind. 

 In March they are always to be found in pairs. Aristotle affirms all these kind 

 of creatures to be of a spontaneous birth, and no more to contribute to the pro- 

 duction of one another than trees, and therefore to have no distinction of sex. 

 I have no reason to subscribe to his authority, since I have seen so many of 

 them paired, and in the very act of venery. That they engender then is most 

 certain ; but whether those that are thus found coupled be one of them male 

 and the other female, or rather, as you observed in the Catalogue of Plants 

 growing wild about Cambridge, that they are both male and female, and do in 

 the act of generation both receive into themselves and emit a like penis, I leave 

 to further and more minute discovery to determine.* 



The Romans knew something extraordinary of these kind of animals, that 

 made them so choice of them, as to reckon them among their most delicate 

 food, and to use all care and diligence to breed and fat them for their tables, as 

 related by Varro. 



Of late, comparing Bussy's Histoire Amoureuse de Gaule with Petronius 

 Arbiter, out of whom I was made to believe he had taken two of his letters 

 word for word, besides other love intrigues, I found in running him over what 

 satisfied me not a little in this very subject of snails, viz. that these very animals, 

 as well as other odd things in nature, as truflftes, mushrooms, and no doubt too 

 the cosci or great worms in the oak, another Roman dainty, were made use of 

 by the ancients to incite venery. You will there find, that the distressed and 

 feeble lover prepares himself with a ragout of snails' necks (cervices cochlearum,) 

 in which the penis is placed. 



* The two snails here mentioned seem to be the turbo bidens and turbo penersus of Linnaeus. 

 Both species are generally found among mosses, on the bark, and in the hollow of old trees. With 

 respect to the breeding of these animals, it is similar to that of most of tlie snail tribe, in which each 

 individual is a hermaphrodite, but incapable of impregnating itself, so tliat it is necessary that two 

 individuals should reciprocally communicate by their respective organs. 



