Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/230

 226 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. In his arrangement of invertebrate

the manner in which they have the principal viscera packed within the spiral shell.