Indirect and Direct Benefits. 4.5 
otherwise with the still poorer inhabitants of several of the 
Western Isles of Scotland. Periwinkles and limpets (Patélla 
vulgata) (4), which so profusely stud the rocks of their shores, 
are their daily fare, and on which they are sometimes reduced 
to the necessity of altogether subsisting. In the Isle of Skye, 
for example, we are told that there is almost annually a degree 
of famine, when the poor are left to Providence’s care, and 
prowl, like other animals, along the shores, to pick up limpets 
and other shellfish: * the casual repast,” adds Mr. Pennant, 
from whom I have borrowed this melancholy account, ‘ of 
hundreds, during part of the year, in these unhappy islands.” * 
NW 
Ns 
I 
H iia iN 
H 
MMA Hie 
mu 
LAN 
wD 
Ne 
Shellfish, then, you observe, are not mere luxuries: here 
they become almost essential to man’s existence ; and, from 
the particulars related by Captain Cook, we cannot hesitate to 
admit that the natives of Australia also derive their principal 
subsistence from them. Wherever marks of fire were ob- 
served, there the shells of oysters, cockles, muscles, and various 
other bivalves, robbed of their contents, were strewed around, 
and sometimes in numbers scarcely credible. They apparently 
eat none of them in a raw state, nor do they always go on 
shore to dress them, for they have frequently fires in their 
canoes for that purpose. To the people of Terra del Fuego, 
shellfish are every thing. Captain Cook saw no appearance 
of their having any other food; * for, though seals were fre- 
quently seen near the shore, they seemed to have no imple- 
ments for taking them. ‘The shellfish are collected by the 
women, whose business it seems to be to attend, at low water, 
with a basket in one hand, a stick pointed and barbed in the 
other, and a satchel at their backs: they loosen the limpets 
and other fish, that adhere to the rocks, with the stick, and 
put them into the basket, which, when full, they empty into 
the satchel.” 
Of the naked Mollisca, the cuttle-fish (Sepia officinalis, or 
rather Octopus vulgaris) only has been used. ‘This singular 
* See his Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772, 
