374 JOURNAL OF CONCHOLOGY. 
AY Visi OA -SNATE SPAR 
An extract from a friend’s letter communicated to the Conchological 
Society by Mr. R. D. DARBISHIRE. 
(Read before the Conchological Society, July 7th, 1896). 
The Farm consisted of one large meadow fenced in from 
the road by boards about a foot high. The owner employs 
people to collect the snails from the neighbouring woods and 
meadows. They bring in from 1,000 to 2,000 daily, com- 
mencing as soon as the snows melt, say, about April. 
They are placed at once on one-half of the meadow and 
left to graze until the month of July, when they are removed to 
the other half of the field. This is all divided up into squares, 
like a gigantic chess-board, by boards a foot high. Each square 
is filled with a thick bed of moss on which the snails are placed, 
to be fed on cabbages for three months. ‘They become very fat 
and large and of a greenish-white colour, like the pieces of cab- 
bage. ‘Towards the end of September the snails beign to burrow 
down through the moss so that they are completely hidden. 
They lie there with the openings upwards till they have com- 
pletely closed themselves in for the winter, forming a hard cover 
over the mouth of the shell. It is in this condition that they 
are exported, as they can now be kept till required. 
The price the farmer gets per 1,000 is 17 francs for the 
sealed shells, and ro frances for open ones, which have to be used 
at once. All had to be despatched to Troyes by the 4th of 
October, by which time all that were going to close would be 
sealed, but some always remain open. 
They had from sixty to eighty thousand snails on the 
ground; all exactly alike except that some were slightly darker 
than others. The farmer assured me that they never varied in 
any way, and he never came across any unusual growth. 
CHALET Sr. DENIs, 
FRIBOURG, October, 1894. 
J.C., viii., Apr. 1897. 
