162 JOURNAL OF CONCHOLOGY, VOL. 9, NO. 6, APRIL, 1899. 



Trout and other fish all feed greedily on snails, and Jeffreys has 

 recorded the finding of 350 shells of Valvata piscinalis in the sto- 

 mach of a large eel. Bats have even been found feeding on Paludina, 

 Planorbis, and Anodonta, but I think they must have been much 

 pressed by hunger to do so. And, lastly, slugs are themselves canni- 

 bals, and thus assist in keeping up the balance of nature. 



IV. — As articles of merchandise, and so contributing to the wage- 

 earning of men. 



From what I have already said under my second heading, "As food 

 for man," it logically follows that, if they are to be consumed in any 

 large quantities, molluscs must be gathered and collected and even 

 reared to supply a lucrative market. So we find in France and other 

 countries of the Continent, regular snail farms, or " Escargatoirs," at 

 Fribourg, Dijon, Troyes, Copenhagen, and in Lorraine, Brunswick, 

 Wurttemberg, and other places, where some nineteen species of snails 

 are regularly collected and fattened for the market as being suitable 

 for food, especially during Lent. The price of Helix nem oralis at 

 Toulouse is from five to ten centimes a dish, and Moquin-Tandon 

 purchased H. aspersa at fifteen centimes per hundred, and H. nemo- 

 ralis at five centimes per hundred. H. pisana sells at Marseilles at 

 about three francs per fifty kilogrammes, and the much-esteemed H. 

 pomatia at one franc fifty centimes per hundred. In Paris, Harting 

 states the daily consumption of H. pomatia to be 100,000, and Sim- 

 mons gives the profits of a snailery near Dijon at ^300 a year. 



Our members will recollect Mr. Darbishire's most interesting notes 

 in our Journal (vol. 8, p. 374) " On a Visit to a Snail Farm," wherein 

 is described the collecting and fattening of these snails for market, 

 where they are sold wholesale at seventeen francs per thousand for 

 " sealed shells " (that is, when closed by an epiphragm, or false oper- 

 culum for hibernation), and ten francs per thousand for open shells. 

 They are then despatched to Paris, where they come into season with 

 the first frost, and are boiled in their shells, and seasoned with fresh 

 butter mixed with parsley and a little garlic. Lovell says the Parisians 

 partake of from fifteen to twenty for breakfast, when they are said to 

 give a better flavour to wine. I have several times tried to establish 

 a colony of these snails in my own garden, but they have always 

 wandered away, and the last was brought back to me last spring after 

 an absence of three years, from a place half-a-mile distant, to reach 

 which it must have crossed the fields and one if not two roads. 



Perhaps, however, the most lucrative species of our mollusca, from 

 a business point of view, is the pearl-producing Unio margaritifer. 

 Both Unio titmidus and U. pictorum sometimes produce pearls, but 



