THE MUSEUM. 
23 
For The Museum. 
CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT SNAILS. 
BY EDWIN A. BARBER. 
Those who are familiar with our common large 
garden snail [Helix albolabris, Say), which carries 
its house on its back, have doubtless noticed that the 
shell is coiled toward the right hand. The shells of 
most species of snails turn in the same direction, for 
which reason they are called dextral shells. Coop¬ 
er’s Helix of the Rocky Mountains has this charac¬ 
teristic, but is smaller and striped with brown. It 
occurs abundantly on the plateaus of Colorado, and 
in some localities specimens can be scooped up by 
the quart. One day the writer was hunting amongst 
the bushes along a ravine, for conchological speci¬ 
mens, when he picked up the one represented in the 
accompanying engraving. Some peculiarity of the 
shell attracted his attention, but what was it ? Could 
it be a new species ? No ! An examination showed 
that it was a specimen of H. Cooperi , but reversed, 
turning toward the left hand. It is a freak of na¬ 
ture, just as much so as a man whose heart is placed 
on the right side, and we are told that such cases 
have been known. 
There are other species of snails, however, which 
always turn in this direction—that is toward the 
left, when they are called sinistral, as, for instance, 
the fresh water genus Physa. If we should find 
one of these turning the same way as our garden 
snail we should call it a reversed specimen, and 
such examples are rare and deserve to be preserved 
as curiosities. 
Some snails, as Helix Cooperi , are viviparous , 
that is, they bring forth their young alive, each one 
with a tiny shell, perfectly formed. At a certain 
time of the year, if an adult female of this species 
be killed by scalding, and picked out of its shell 
with a pin, we shall find in it a dozen or more of 
these little shells. Other snails, such as the one first 
mentioned, are oviparous —that is, they lay little 
globular eggs, from which, in time, little garden 
snails are hatched. 
Some snails close the doors of their houses by 
little lids which fit nicely into the openings when 
the snails have retired. These plates are called 
opercula. In some snails this operculum is heavy 
and thick; in others it is thin and horny. In the 
garden snail it is absent, but when he draws himself 
into his shell he closes the opening with a thin, 
transparent membrane which excludes the air. 
Snails will live a long time without food, under 
certain conditions. I once had a common snail 
which I placed in a little box and locked in a 
drawer. As soon as he found himself a captive he 
sealed himself up in his house and went to sleep. 
Two years afterwards I thought of my snail again. 
On opening the box I found him just as I had left 
him, and on placing him in a moist place I soon had 
the satisfaction of seeing him come out, apparently 
as lively as ever. A case is recorded of a snail, 
shell which had been glued to a card and placed in 
a casein a museum, where it remained twelve years. 
One day the curator noticed a film over the opening, 
and on placing the shell in water the occupant came 
out, presumably as hungry as a bear, after his long 
fast of twelve years. How much longer he might 
have lived shut up in his prison, had he not been 
disturbed, it is impossible to say. 
Zoology. —Since our last issue the following ani¬ 
mals have arrived at the Philadelphia Zoological 
Garden:—One otter, four prairie wolves, one Vir¬ 
ginia deer, one Mazame deer, one raccoon, one alli¬ 
gator, one common crossbill, one California quail, 
two Gambel’s partridges, two Cayenne rail, one 
great-horned owl, two yellow birds, and one red¬ 
tailed hawk. 
The Zoological Society’s Gardens, of London, 
England, received recently two Macaque monkeys, 
from India, a Campbell’s monkey from West Africa, 
a European boar, an emu, from Australia, and a 
large number of smaller birds, some of them of 
great rarity. 
Ornithology and OSlogy. —An Interesting 
Case of Parasitism. —Our well-known cuckoos, 
the black-billed and the yellow-billed, have some 
