504 
MOLLUSCA. 
Bath and Bristol, England, surrounded by serpents, changed them by the fervor of her devotion 
into headless stones. Nor were these opinions confined to the 
mere vulgar. Wormius described ammonites as petrified ad- 
ders ; Langius considered them to be either the vertebrae of 
serpents or convoluted marine insects. These notions were 
not lost on the dealers; and there are few fossil collections 
which do not even now possess what is called "a perfect 
Cornu Ammonis," that is, an Ammonite with a carved ser- 
pent's head ingeniously fitted on to the fossil shell. Some 
learned men considered them as freaks of nature, formed by 
the plastic power of the earth. The ancients held them in 
high estimation as very sacred, and of the highest value to the 
dreamer. At the present day these shells, aside from their use 
as curiosities for the conchologist and the geologist, serve no 
other purpose than to increase the volume of the rocks and 
strata of the earth. But in the age in which these creatures 
were all living in the sea, swarming by milHons, many of them 
of truly gigantic dimensions, and all of carnivorous and preda- 
cious habits, what a spectacle of devastation must they have 
presented ! 
Besides the common form of a convoluted or twisted horn, 
presented by the extinct animals we have described, there were 
others of difierent shapes, to which the names of Lituites, Turrilites, &c., have been given. 
TUEEILLITES. 
LITUITES. 
