BUCCINUM. 177 



on the fishermen's hooks. Orsted tells us, in his interesting 

 treatise ' De regionibus marinis,' that great numbers of B. un- 

 datum and Fusus antiquus are collected in the Cattegat for fish- 

 bait, by putting a dead cod into a wicker basket and letting it 

 down on a muddy bottom ; it is soon taken up half-filled with 

 whelks. The same method is adopted for their capture on the 

 English and Irish coasts. The whelk affords an illustration of the 

 lex talionis ; fishes in their turn devour it with equal greediness. 

 I have seen between thirty and forty shells of B. undatum ex- 

 tracted from the stomach of a single cod. After the shell has 

 been cleared out and ejected by the fish, it makes a convenient 

 habitation for the hermit-crab. Other nations have not quite so 

 great a fancy as ours for eating the whelk ; perhaps it is an indige- 

 nous taste ; for when the Romans were in this country, they 

 seem to have acquired it being one which they could not gratify 

 in Italy. Shells of B. undatum, mixed with those of the oyster, 

 have been noticed among the ruins of a Roman station at Rich- 

 borough. At the enthronization feast of William Warham, 

 Archbishop of Canterbury, on the 9th of March, 1504, there 

 were provided ' 8000 whelks at 5s. per 1000.' In the shell-fish 

 market at Billingsgate the present species goes by the name of 

 the ' white ' or ' common ' whelk, in contradistinction to Fusus 

 antiquus, which is there called the 4 red ' or ' almond ' whelk. 

 My obliging informant, Mr. Baxter, says, 4 Wilks must be sold 

 the same day we receive them at market in the summer, being 

 the day after they are caught ; if the supply is greater than the 

 demand, we boil them, and they keep good for several days.' 

 Evidence was given before a select committee of the House of 

 Commons in the Session of 1866, on the ' Whitstable oyster- 

 fishery extension Bill,' that the whelk-fishery on a sandy flat in 

 that bay yielded 12.000 a year, part of the produce being dis- 

 posed of in the London market for food, and the rest sent to the 

 cod-fishing banks for bait. They are seldom eaten in the northern 

 part of our Isles. At Dieppe and Nantes they may occasionally 

 be seen exposed for sale in the fish-markets. The embryology of 

 B. undatum has been investigated by Baster and many other 

 writers. Its curious spawn-cells are figured in Ellis' Corallines 

 as ' Alcyonium sen Vesicularia marina of Bauhin ;' they are 

 23 



