UOW TIDE TREASURES 193 



in the sand as the turrets and staircase shells on the rocky 

 shore take up their shells and walk. There is a bivalves 

 parade. The active green, almost terrestrial, little shore 

 crab is now known to have handsomer cousins of stranger 

 tints and robuster build. The sea itself clear and shallow, 

 with ripples no bigger than the pucker on a smiling face, 

 is alive with prawns that look very real and solid beside 

 the ghostlike humpbacks of the upshore pools. We 

 have almost transgressed what is called the &quot;littoral 

 zone &quot; into the laminarian is it ? and as evidence of a 

 new country is a seaweed as strong as a trunk with a base 

 like the aerial roots of a tropical tree. The comparison 

 is inevitable, however carefully we have been taught that 

 seaweeds have no roots only suckers, as they have no 

 seeds, only spores. 



We are all like Father O Flynn that could be con- 

 chologists if we d the call. Though few acknowledge 

 the call, the shell has an irresistible attraction for all sorts 

 and conditions of sea visitors. Who can resist picking 

 up the stray, ribbed, and channelled scallops on the 

 beach at Mallaig, or the cowries in South Wales, or the 

 iridescent venuses on Cornish sands, or another of pearl 

 &quot; tops &quot; and turret shells anywhere and everywhere ? 

 At Woolacombe, in North Devon, some of the shelving 

 beaches are wholly covered to a great depth with the 

 debris of shells in lieu of shingle, and among them only 

 two shells keep their form and shape undamaged, the 

 little cowries (for which every man, woman, and child 

 searches) and the gross limpets. The sand thereabouts 

 holds only bivalves which, in* spite of their delicacy and 

 thinness, remain often quite undbipped. In some seaside 

 places La Panne, in Belgium, is one the so-called sand 

 consists wholly of shells (as, indeed, does much of the 

 Portland stone), and it is compacted into a sort of 



N T.V.E. 



