"Mollusc" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question concerning the Amphineura is how far do they represent the original condition of the ancestral mollusc? That is to say, we have to inquire which of their structural features is primitive and which modified. Their bilateral symmetry is obviously to be regarded as primitive, and the nervous system shows an original condition from which that of the asymmetrical twisted Gastropods can be derived. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... reason be an irreducible faculty or not: all this ought surely to take precedence of the number of joints in a Crustacean's antenna. These enormous questions would need an army of workers; and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusc and the Zoophyte. (Zoophytes are plant-like sea-animals, including Star-fishes, Jelly-fishes, Sea-anemones, and Sponges.—Translator's Note.) The depths of the sea are explored with many drag-nets; the soil which we tread is consistently disregarded. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... a group of crabs (family Paguridae), of which the hinder part of the body is soft, and which habitually lodge themselves in the empty shell of some mollusc. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... appear, having in one feature a family likeness to the polyps, upon whose hospitality they impose, that is, if the setting up of an establishment on the remains of innumerable ancestors of its host may be said to be merely an imposition. One is a species of mollusc which resembles, in some respects, that to which has been given the name of SURPULA. In its babyhood it attaches itself to the coral, and forthwith begins to build a home, which is nothing more than a calcareous tube, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... n. Not the true Cat's-eye, but the name given in Australia to the opercula of Turbo smaragdus, Martyn, a marine mollusc. The operculum is the horny or shelly lid which closes the aperture of most ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... fittest"—and this is nothing but the fact that those who "fit" best into their surroundings will live longest and most comfortably—to have more to do with the development of the amoeba into, we will say, a mollusc than heredity itself. True, "inheritance of functionally produced modifications" is allowed to be the chief factor throughout the "higher stages of organic evolution," but it has very little to do in the lower; in these "the almost exclusive factor" is not ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... when he first tried a Rockaway, as if he were swallowing a baby, what would have been his impressions if he had tickled his throat with one of these monsters? Sometimes a dozen, or even twenty pearls, are said to have been found in a single oyster. I remember hearing in China that a fresh water mollusc is made to grow pearls by the introduction of foreign bodies within the shell. These produce irritation which the shell fish seeks to allay by depositing around them a layer of pearly matter, and thus pearls are formed. It is a fact that the ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... the shoots are regular and successive; but after that time they become irregular, and are piled one over the other, so that the shell becomes more and more thickened and bulky. Judging from the great thickness to which some oyster-shells have attained, this mollusc is capable, if left to its natural changes and unmolested, of attaining a patriarchal longevity. Among fossil oysters, specimens are found occasionally of enormous thickness; and the amount of time that has passed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... of the lovely sea-nymph Galatea and dissolves himself with the shining animalculae of the sea. There he is now—coming up to the full estate of manhood by the various stages of protozoon, amoeba, mollusc, fish, reptile, bird, mammal, Man. It will take time, but he has no need ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... which is within our reach, that which is to unfold itself within the little sphere of years, a secretion of our spiritual organism, that envelops us in Time, even as the shell or the cocoon envelops the mollusc or the insect in space; that, together with all the external events relating to it, is probably recorded in that sphere. In any case, it would be much more natural that it were so recorded than comprehensible that it be not. There we have realities struggling ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting |
