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PART IILOf S H E L L-F I S H.

S HELL-FISH are animals with a soft body, covered by, or included in, afirm, hard, and, as it were, fiony covering, composed of one or more parts, andmore or less moveable at the animal's pleasure.

she genera of the Shell-fish are extreamly numerous, and the species, undermany of them, are also very much so. she animals, included in these hard, external cases,have mojl of them the characters of one or other of the genera of the Gymnarthria beforedescribed, and might be reduced under the same genera with the naked ones ; or the wholeseries of Shellfish might be arranged according to their char afterS-, but as these charac-ters are few, and the bodies themselves very numerous ; and as the external coverings orshells are extreamly different in their form and flrufture, and these differences are suffi-ciently obvious, determinate, and numerous ; it will tend more to the making naturalhiftory an easy and an universalfiudy, to arrange this part of it according to the dif-ferences of the shells themselves, than those of the included animals, shere is this far-ther consideration also in favour os this arrangement, that the bodies of the animals them-selves are very rarely seen, and never preserved in colleftions, whereas the shells make aneminent figure in them ; and that many of them have been only met with, empty of theincluded animal.

1 shall not so far disregard, indeed, the form and flrufture os the hicluded animal,as to leave the reader in the dark as to what it is • but, as all of the fame.genus are the fame in this refpeft, it will be sufficient barely to mention which of thefor-mer genera os Gymnarthria they belong to, aster the generic al char afters of the shell.'Thus Ishall not omit to say, that the animal inhabiting the patella is a Umax ; that theanimals inhabiting the several shells of the cochlea, the nerite, the buccinum, the turbo,the trochus, the voluta, the murcx, the purpura, and the lyra, are all limaces also ; andthat the inhabitants of the concha Veneris and auris marina are all of the fame genus:that the inhabitant of the dentalium is a Nereis, that of the nautilus a Sepia, that ofthe ofirea, the peften, and the like, a Tethys, and that of the concha anatifera andbalanus a Tsiton.

The mention of this, at the head of the genus, will convey a sufficient idea of what theanimal is that inhabits the outer cafe, which is the objeft of our more immediate atten-tion ; and I fatter my self, that it will appear much better to pay this secondary regardto the form of the body os the creature, than, for the fake os arranging those os the jameflrufture in the less obvious part together, to have brought into one genus the auris ma-rina, the concha Venerea, the buccinum, the voluta, and the patella.

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