great sections, viz. herbivorous and carnivorous; the carnivorous are also divisible into two families of different office, the one attacking and destroying living bodies, the other eating dead bodies that have perished in the course of nature, or from accidental causes; after the manner of those species of predaceous beasts and birds, e. g. the Hyænas and Vultures, which, by preference, live on carrion. The same principle of economy in nature, which causes the dead carcasses of the hosts of terrestrial herbivorous animals to be accelerated, in their decomposition, by forming the food of numerous carnivore, appears also to have been applied to the submarine inhabitants of the most ancient, as well as of the existing seas; thus converting the death of one tribe into the nutriment and support of life in others.
It is stated by Mr. Dillwyn, in a paper read before the
Royal Society, June 1823, that Pliny has remarked, that the
animal which was supposed to yield the Tyrian die, obtained
its food by boring into other shells by means of an elongated
tongue; and Lamarck says, that all those Mollusks
whose shells have a notch or canal at the base of their aperture,
are furnished with a similar power of boring, by means
of a retractile proboscis.[1] In his arrangement of invertebrate
the manner in which they have the principal viscera packed within the spiral shell.
- ↑ The proboscis, by means of which these animals are enabled to drill holes through shells, is armed with a number of minute teeth, set like the teeth of a file, upon a retractile membrane, which the animal is enabled to fix in a position adapted for boring or filing a hole from without, through the substance of shells, and through this hole to extract and feed upon the juices of the body within them. A familiar example of this organ may be seen in the retractile proboscis of Buccinum Lapillus, and Buccinum Undatum, the common whelks of our own shores. A valuable Paper on this subject has recently been published by Mr. Osler (Phil. Trans., 1832, Part 2, P. 497,) in which he gives an engraved figure of the tongue of the Buccinum Undatum, covered with its rasp, whereby it perforates the shells of animals destined to become its prey. Mr. Osler modifies the rule or the distinction between the shells of carnivore and herbivore, by showing that, although it is true that all beaked shells in-
