Sud] AND SYMBOLS. 337 



Success a Constitutional Trait. 



The fork-tailed date-shell (Lithodomus caudiyera) is able to 

 bore into the hardest stones and stoutest shells, which are 

 found pierced by hundreds of these curious beings. They seem 

 to have one prevailing instinct, namely, to bore their way 

 through everything. Onwards, ever onwards, seems to be the 

 law of their existence, and most thoroughly do they carry it 

 out. There is not any particular credit due to them, for they 

 merely obey a blind instinct, and their success in their borings 

 is a constitutional trait. There are men born with the same 

 instinct which the occupant of this shell possesses. As a result, 

 they are as successful as those born without it are unsuccessful. 

 They need not brag about their achievements. The whole ex- 

 planation of them will be found in the fact that Nature arranges 

 matters by law and not by luck. Their success is simply owing 

 to their constitutional trait. It has no more eccentricity, says 

 Emerson, than the gingham or muslin we weave in our mills. 



H. 



Sudden Death and Immediate Burial an Old Law 



of Nature. 



It has been remarked, and truly, that many of the fish and 

 saurians, found fossil in the lias, must have met with sudden 

 death and immediate burial, and that the destructive operation, 

 whatever may have been its nature, was often repeated. Some- 

 times, says Dr. Buckland, scarcely a single bone or scale has 

 been removed from the place it occupied during life, which 

 could not have happened had the uncovered bodies of these 

 saurians been left, even for a few hours, exposed to putrefaction 

 and to the attacks of fishes and other smaller animals at the 

 bottom of the sea. Not only are the skeletons of the ichthy- 

 osaurs entire, but sometimes the contents of their stomachs 

 still remain between their ribs, so that we can discover the 

 particular species of fish on which they lived, and the form of 

 their excrements. B. 



