"Molluscan" Quotes from Famous Books
... were grouped with the snails and oysters as mollusks. But the barnacle did not fit well with other mollusks. Its shell was entirely different. It had several pairs of legs; and no mollusk has legs. The barnacle is evidently a sessile crab or better crustacean. Its molluscan characteristics were only skin-deep, evidently an adaptation to a mode of life like that of mollusks. The old artificial systems were based too much on merely external characteristics, the results of adaptation. When ... — The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler |