19 MANUAL OF THE MOLLUSCA.’ 
and cuttles, who vindicate their high position in the naturalists’ 
‘‘system,” by preying eyem on fishes. 
As the shell-fish are great eaters, so in their turn they afford 
food to many other creatures; fulfilling the universal law of 
eating and being eaten. Ciyilised man still swallows the 
oyster, although snails are no longer reckoned ‘‘a dainty dish;”’ 
mussel, cockles, and periwinkles are in great esteem with 
children and the other unsophisticated classes of society ; and 
so are scallops and the haliotis, where they can be obtaimed. 
Two kinds of whelk are brought to the London market in great 
quantities; and the arms of the cuttle-fish are eaten by the 
Neapolitans, and also by the East Indians and Malays. In 
seasons of scarcity, vast quantities of shell-fish are consumed 
by the poor inhabitants of the Scotch and Irish coasts.* Still 
more are regularly collected for bait; the calamary 1s much 
used in the cod-fishery, off Newfoundland, and the limpet and 
whelk on our own coasts. 
Many wild animals feed on shell-fish; the rat and the raccoon 
seek for them on the sea-shore when pressed by hunger; the 
South American otter, and the crab-eating opossum constantly 
resort to salt-marshes, and the sea, in order to prey on the 
mollusca ; the great whale lives habitually on the small floating 
pteropods ; sea-fowl search for the littoral species at every 
ebbing tide; whilst, in their own element, the marine kind 
are perpetually devoured by fishes. The haddock is a ‘‘ great 
conchologist ;”” and some rare northern sea-shells haye been 
rescued, unbroken, from the stomach of the cod; whilst even 
the strong valyes of the cyprina are not proof against the teeth 
of the cat-fish (anarhicas). 
They even fall a prey to animals much their inferiors in 
sagacity; the star-fish swallows the small bivalve entire, and 
dissolyes the animal out of its shell; and the bubble-shell 
(philine), itself predacious, is eaten both by star-fish and sea- 
anemone (actinia). ; 
The land-snails afford food to many birds, especially to the 
thrush tribe; and to some insects, for the luminous larva of 
the glow-worm lives on them, and some of the large predacious 
beetles (e.g., carabus violaceus and goerius olens), occasionally 
kill siugs. 
The greatest enemies of the mollusca, howeyer, are those of 
* See Hugh Miller’s “Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland.” The Ajok- 
rkenmodings, or kitchen refuse-heaps, which have been found so abundantly in Den- 
mark, Scotland, New Zealand, and elsewhere, are sometimes hundreds of yards in 
length, and composed almost entirely of shells, 
