THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



S 



through the medium of this magazine. ' I shall, I trust, complete them ere 

 long, but I am labouring under the disadvantage of not living on the spot. 

 However, I pay it a visit whenever I can, and the railway communication 

 with Cambridge is cheap and rapid so I am getting a fair amount of know- 

 ledge of the marine zoology of this region. 



I will not at present attempt to give a complete list of the shells I have 

 found there, but will reserve this for a future paper. I will merely mention 

 a few of the Gasteropoda now and jot down a few remarks about them. 



Purpura lapillus is common and I take home many living specimens in 

 the hope of acclimatising them to my aquarium, but it is a species which does 

 not seem to bear confinement well, for mine always die after I have had them 

 a few months. Their favourite food is a fresh mussel, and they do not take 

 kindly to the scraped meat with which I feed all the carnivorous denizens of 

 my aquaria. I do not succeed well either with the Common Edible Whelk 

 {Buccinum undatum), I fancy they require a deeper body of water than my 

 small aquarium. 



The Dog Whelks [Nassa reticulata and Nassa incrassata) are very common 

 on the mussel beds in front of Hunstanton Cliffs. Contrary to my experience 

 with Purpura lapillus and Buccinum undatum I have little difficulty in keep- 

 ing these and they thrive very well in my aquarium. They like shallow 

 water best and spend much of their time out of that element, thus resembling 

 the common periwinkle in their fondness for an amphibious sort of existence. 

 They eat scraped meat fairly well but prefer a piece of dead fish or fresh 

 mussel. They always feed at night ; never, as far as I have observed in the 

 daytime. Their sense of smell is very keen and they soon find the meat out. 

 Whelks rasp their food with their lingual ribbon instead of masticating it. 

 This lingual ribbon is furnished with numerous siliceous teeth, in Buccinum 

 undalum there are as many as a hundred rows of these teeth and they are 

 quite capable of rasping a hole in a mussel shell ; a feat which indeed Pur- 

 pura lapillus often performs. The tongue of a whelk forms a very interesting 

 microscopic object, and one well worth the trouble of preparation. 



Periwinkles are abundant on the rocks which the receding tide leaves bare, 

 Liltorina littoreus varies a good deal, not only in the ground colour of its 

 shell, but also in the number of its bands. I have found over a dozen differ- 

 ent varieties at Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast of the Wash. The com- 

 monest forms are black with no bands, and black with one brown band, spire 

 of shell white. Greenish grey forms are also common ; some of these have * 

 twelve black bands, others have the same number of brown ones, and I have 

 found specimens more rarely with four broad black bands, and three narrow 

 brown ones with one red band close to the spire ; these last have the spire of the 



