THE CULT OF SHELLS 63 
of the impact which they made long ago on the 
mental framework of our ancestors? The child 
holds the shell to its ear, and listens to the supposed 
reverberation of the sea. What it hears is the 
sympathetic resonance of vibrations selected by the 
shell from the outside aerial turmoil, though some 
say a little is due to the internal vibrations of 
pulsing blood-vessel and tensely-strung muscle. 
But we wonder whether there may not be in the 
familiar childish experience some echoing recapitu- 
lation of a very old, very widespread, racial custom. 
For the cult of shells goes back to remote antiquity, 
and for millennia simple peoples listened to the voice 
of God in the sea-snail’s shell. 
Of the great interest of shells to students of 
human history we have had a recent revelation in 
Mr. Wilfrid Jackson’s learned work on Shells as 
Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture 
(1917), one of the ethnological publications of the 
University of Manchester. To this memoir Pro- 
fessor Elliot Smith contributes a luminous introduc- 
tory essay, which helps us to understand the grip 
which shells took of human nature in the days of its 
impressionable youth. A new light is also thrown, 
as he says, on the curiously logical sequence of 
Father O'Flynn’s intellectual achievements— 
Down from mythology into thayology, 
Troth! and conchology, if he'd the call. 
In many cases, as it seems to us, where living 
creatures or their products have strongly gripped 
mankind, there have been three factors at work— 
