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Glittering in the original hues of their shells, odd beyond all others 

 in their shapes, they seem to call out for recognition. What 

 wonder if they excited the interest and puzzled the minds of men 

 before the science of geology was called into existence. What 

 wonder if they gave rise to legends and traditions which have now 

 become as interesting as the fossils themselves. Bnake-stones — 

 what a natural name to give them ; petrified, coiled up, snakes — 

 tJie readiest explanation of their existence. Curiously always 

 devoid of a head, though this deficiency has often been ingeniously 

 supplied by local fossil merchants. But how petrified in such 

 numbers ? Sir Walter Scott tells us in Marmion how the nuns of 

 Whitby gathered in the evening round the fire, relating tales of the 

 wonders wrought by then- patroness. They told how 



Of thousand snakes each one 



Was changed into a coil of stone 

 When holy Hilda prayed. 



For it appears that the holy maidens who dwelt at the Convent of 

 Whitby were much distressed by the snakes infesting its precincts, 

 and that the abbess at length succeeded in her request that they 

 might be beheaded and petrified. And so there they are at this 

 day to the discomfiture of all who delight in their own incredulity. 



Let us pick out a few of them, and question them relative to 

 their origin and history. If we are interested in the half-ruined 

 dwellingti of vanished races of men in the uninhabited wilds of 

 America, or the desolate forests of India, how much more so must 

 we needs be in regarding these habitations of a family of creatures 

 that literally swarmed in the early seas. Not a bed of rock or clay 

 from the Severn to the Wash, from the English Channel to the 

 Yorkshire Moors, that does not yield them by hundreds. They 

 boast of an antiquity before which that of pre-historic man fades 

 into nothingness. Frail creatures in themselves, with soft fleshy 

 bodies, they secreted from those bodies the dwellings which still 

 survive. 



They belong to the sub-kingdom known to zoologists as the 

 MoUusca — a set of animals wholly soft in structure, and with no 

 skeleton whatever — the set which includes our snails, oysters, 

 slugs, cuttlefishes and others of that ilk represented on the diagram. 

 To the geologist this is the most important section of the animal 

 world, for by the traces its members have left behind, he for the 

 most part is enabled to classify rocks. And it is nearly the oldest 

 section too, for the most ancient fossiliferous rocks of Great Britain 

 — those called the Camorian give us specimens. 



But it is a wide, far-reaching snb-kingdom, and our Ammonites 

 belong to its highest class, the Cephalopoda, represented at present 

 by the Cuttle-fish, Octopus, and Nautilus. 



