Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4 (1900).djvu/346

316 strated with a pin, was in most cases sufficiently strong to enable the observer to raise the animal to the surface, but not out of the water.

Our little Cowry (Cypræa europæa) makes considerable use of a thread, a fact first noticed by Charles Kingsley, who wrote to Gosse, in 1854, that he had seen the animal suspend itself from the under side of low-tide rocks by a glutinous thread an inch and more in length; in captivity, further, he saw it "float on the surface by means of a similar thread attached to a glutinous bubble." According to a paper by Mr. L.St.G. Byne, the animal is occasionally seen at Teignmouth, hanging by its "byssus" on the rocks at low tide. This statement, as the writer learns from Mr. Byne, is made on the authority of a reliable collector, who mentions, amongst other things, that on lifting a boulder he saw one of these molluscs hang from it by a thread 4-5 in. long. Mr. Hornell, from observations made presumably at Jersey, writes in an interesting manner on the same subject. In confinement in a tank, he says, the little animal frequently crawls foot-uppermost along the surface of the water, and occasionally may be seen to form a little disc of mucus, from which it lowers itself gently by a mucous thread till it hangs in mid-water, dangling in the fashion of a Spider at the end of its silken cord. "This habit of the Cowry is to be correlated," Mr. Hornell adds, "to that more familiar and natural one so readily verified by any observer who visits the low-tide caves and gullies where, amongst Sponges and Ascidians, this animal loves so to live. Here, when the tide recedes, Cowries more or less enveloped in their bright-coloured mantle robes are often seen passively hanging suspended from the gully's roof, or from points and jutting ledges, by a stout mucous thread."

In this family we have notes on a Bittium, a Cerithiopsis, and