Indirect and Direct Benefits. 45 



otherwise with the still poorer inhabitants of several of the 

 Western Isles of Scotland. Periwinkles and limpets (Patella 

 vulgata) (6), 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." * 



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 Mollusca, the cuttle-fish (iSepia officinalis, or 

 rather Oct5pus vulgaris) only has been used. This singular 



* See his Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772. 



