68 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
to powder they effected wondrous cures; in the 
mouth of the dead they gave light to the soul; they 
became emblems of purity and constancy. 
All over the world some use or other seems to 
have been made of cowrie shells, and in many cases 
at least there was a cowrie symbolism. Perforated 
cowries are found associated with the early Cro- 
Magnon men and with pre-dynastic burials in 
Egypt; and they were used as money in China 
more than seven centuries s.c. Now, cowries 
are very beautiful shells, they are also very handy 
for money, tokens, messages, eyes for mummies, 
dice, balloting, and so forth; but there are strong 
reasons for believing (with Mr. Wilfrid Jackson 
and Professor Elliot Smith) that the grip they have 
taken of mankind has owed a great part of its 
tenacity to sex-symbolism suggested to the many 
by the shell’s shape, and to the few by the way the 
living animal, expanding itself in the shore-pool, 
seemed to be born, as it were, from within the shell. 
There was no manual of the common objects of 
the seashore in those days, and to the impressionable 
It was a queer thing to see a rampant, horned and 
hungry creature slowly divulge itself. Moreover, 
were not these big shells exposed only at the lowest 
tides, so that from Mandalay to Mexico they were 
somehow linked to the moon, and thus again to 
women? We cannot help fancying that some of 
the early observers, in days long before Aristotle’s 
illuminating insight, must have seen hermit-crabs 
coming half out of whelk shells and jerking back 
