194 THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS 



he has already said in another. He is fond of digression, 

 and whatever the matter in hand, chance remarks on a 

 variety of subjects are to be expected. If the references 

 were lost, one would hardly look in the chapter on 

 the hive-bee for the two passages next cited. 



All animals, he says, even man himself, proceed from 

 eggs. In another place he speaks confidently about 

 mammalian eggs, though such things were not actually 

 demonstrated before the nineteenth century. 



A chance mention of the egg-masses of the lackey- 

 moth leads him to say that though such eggs might be 

 expected as a matter of course to yield caterpillars, they 

 sometimes yield flies instead, which he considers the 

 most surprising fact in natural history. This must be a 

 very early mention (perhaps the very first) of egg- 

 parasites. 



The Snail and other Mollusks 



Swammerdam takes the apple- snail (Helix pomatia) 

 as his first example of a moUusk.^ He remarks that 

 this species was a pest to the wine-growers of France ; 

 in Holland, however, it was a curiosity, with which 

 people liked to furnish their grottos, and he thinks 

 it worth while to explain how they can be most readily 

 imported. Then he describes and figures the shell ; 

 unfortunately, this and some other figures of snails have 

 been reversed by the engraver. He calls it an operculate 

 shell, though he knew that the so-called operculum 

 is only to be found in winter. The uses of snails as 

 food and medicine are noted. They are, he thinks, 

 a kind of insect, and he places them in his first order of 

 insects, viz. such as undergo no transformation ; else- 

 where he speaks of "Scarabaei et alia Testacea."^ The 



^Biblia Natural, p. 97. ^B.N., p. 197. 



