FOSSIL CHAMBERED SHELLS, 
3I() 
By the help of this living example, we are pre- 
pared to investigate the question of the uses, to 
which all fossil Chambered shells may have been 
subservient, and to show the existence of design 
and order in the mechanism, whereby they w ere 
appropriated to a peculiar and important func- 
tion, in the economy of millions of creatures long 
since swept from the face of the living world. 
From the similarity of these mechanisms to those 
still employed in animals of the existing crea- 
tion, we see that all such contrivances and 
adaptations, how'ever remotely separated by time 
or space, indicate a common origin in the vvill 
and design of one and the same Intelligence. 
We enter then upon our examination of the 
structure and uses of fossil Chambered shells, 
mites, Scaphites, Belemnites, &c. (See PI. 44), in which the 
last, or external chamber, seems to have been too small to 
contain the entire body of the animals that foraied them, by 
Peron’s discovery of the well-known chambered shell, the 
Spirula, partially enclosed within the posterior extremity of 
the body of a Sepia (PI. 44, Figs. 1,2). Although some doubts 
have existed respecting the autlieiiticity of this specimen, in 
consequence of a discrepance between two drawings professedly 
taken from it (the one published in the Eneyclopedie Metho- 
dique, the other in Peron’s Voyage), and from the loss of the 
specimen itself before any anatomical examination of it had been 
made, the subsequent discovery by Captain King of the same 
shell, attached to a portion of the mutilated body of some 
imdescribed Cephalopod allied to the Sepia, leaves little doubt 
of the fact that the Spirula was an internal shell, having its 
dorsal margin ow/y exposed, after the manner represented in both 
the drawings from the specimen of Peron. (See PI. 44, Fig. !•) 
