234 THE STRUCTURE AND 



an inch in diameter at oneendand gradually tapering to 

 one fifth of an inch at the other, whence it ahruptly 

 terminated in a short cone, perforated in the centre. 

 The whole length was an inch and a half, and its 

 texture was that of an elegant mosaic, composed of 

 grains of fine sand of various colours, and excessively 

 minute fragments of shell, agglutinated together so 

 as , to he pretty strong, though not more than one 

 grain thick. It was only with a lens that this struc- 

 ture could he seen ; to the naked eye it seemed an 

 uniform substance, slightly rough, and of a pale red 

 Jiue, dotted with black. 



On looking into the larger end of this tube, I could 

 see what looked like a stopper of white flesh, exactly 

 fitting the calibre, and moving up and down in the 

 tube like a piston. Occasionally it was protruded a 

 little beyond the edge, when its extremity was seen to 

 be truncate, or, as it were, cut straight off, so that it 

 was just like a cork that moves freely up and down in 

 the neck of a bottle. But from the summit of this 

 fleshy cork two organs were projecting, each of which 

 exactly resembled a lady's hack comb, the teeth being 

 curved in the same manner ; only we must suppose 

 them to be bevelled off on each side, the central teeth 

 of each comb being much the longest; their surface 

 is highly metallic, reflecting the light exactly like 

 burnished gold. These two combs are placed side 

 by side, (or edge to edge) so that together they extend 

 nearly all across the flat end of the "cork" ; not how- 

 ever in a straight but an angled line, so as to cut ofi' 

 about 120°, or one third of the circle. 



When the creature had overcome in some degree 



