Page:American Seashells (1954).djvu/17

 Shell collecting is now taking its place as one of the major outdoor diversions. It has advantages over such pursuits as bird watching or fishing, for you may have even more pleasure in studying your catch at home than in the time spent afield. The thrill of finding a shell new to you, or of watching some rare snail going about its watery affairs, is ample reward for the sunburn and stiff neck you may have from wading around too long with a water-glass. Hours sieving dredgings are counted well spent if a fine volute or turrid turns up in the seaweed and rubbish.

American Seashells gives a comprehensive and well-rounded view of the Mollusca in nontechnical language. It is easy reading for the beginner, but it contains also material indispensable to the advanced malacologist. The chapters on nudibranchs and pteropods are especially welcome, for these beautiful animals have always been slighted in American books. In chapters on the life of the snail and the clam, with the author we “listen in” to the current of molluscan life. The shells become living things, moving and breathing, feeding and mating.

One perplexity of the novice is that different books may give different names for the same shell. The causes of this diversity are explained on a later page. With the facilities of the largest museum in America, the author has been able to speak with authority in those matters of nomenclature. When the problem is zoological and still to be solved by further collections, or by the study of living mollusks, then the cooperation of the keen collector may give the answer sought. Professional malacologists are few. Their work is largely in museums with dead animals. The interesting but long task of collecting from a thousand miles of coast, and observing mollusks alive, has always been in large part a labor of love by private naturalists. Our science owes nearly as much to them as to the work of professional zoologists.

The author belongs to the younger group of malacologists, but he has cultivated the society of mollusks in many lands, from East Africa, the