Cuap. XI.] TURBINELLA RAPA. 371 
rapa, to be exported to India, where it is still sawn 
into rings and worn as anklets and bracelets by the 
women of Hindustan. Another use for these shells 
is their conversion into wind instruments, which are 
sounded in the temples on all occasions of ceremony. A 
chank, in which the whorls, instead of running from left 
to right, as in the ordinary shell, are reversed, and run 
from right to left, is regarded with such reverence that 
a specimen formerly sold for its weight in gold, but one 
may now be had for four or five pounds. Cosmas InpIco- 
PLEUSTES, writing in the fifth century, describes a place 
on the west coast of Ceylon, which he calls Marallo, and 
says it produced “ xoyAéous,” which THEvEnoT translates 
“ oysters;” in which case Marallo might be conjectured 
to be Bentotte, near Colombo, which yields the best 
edible “ oysters” in Ceylon.1 But the shell in question 
was most probably the chank, and Marallo was Mantotte, 
off which it is found in great numbers.? In fact, two 
centuries later Abouzeyd, an Arab, who wrote an account 
of the trade and productions of India, speaks of these 
shells by the name they still bear, which he states to 
be schenek*; but “ schenek” is not an Arabic word, and 
is merely an attempt to spell the local term, chank, in 
Arabic characters. 
1 Cosmas INpDIco-PLEUSTES, in 
dia they had found oysters a foot 
Thevenot’s ed. t. i. p. 21. 
long. Puuvy says: “In Indico mari 
® At Kottiar, near Trincomalie, 
I was struck with the prodigious 
size of the edible oysters, which 
were brought to us at the rest- 
house. The shell of one of these 
measured a little more than eleven 
inches in length, by half as many 
broad: thus unexpectedly attest- 
ing the correctness of one of the 
stories related by the historians of 
Alexander’s expedition, that in In- 
Alexandri rerum auctores pedalia 
inveniri prodidere.”— Nat. Hist. 
lib. xxxii. ch. 31. Darwin says, 
that amongst the fossils of Pata- 
gonia, he found ‘a massive gigantic 
oyster, sometimes even a foot in 
diameter.” — Nat. Voy., ch. viii. 
8 AzouzeyD, Voyages Arabes, 
§e., t. ip. 6; Rervaun, Mémoire 
sur P Inde, §c. p. 222. 
BB 2 
