[Footnote 1:  In one of these beautiful little bays near Catchavelly, between Trincomalie and Batticaloa, I found the sand within the wash of the sea literally covered with mollusca and shells, and amongst others a species of Bullia (B. vittata, I think), the inhabitant of which, has the faculty of mooring itself firmly by sending down its membranous foot into the wet sand, where, imbibing the water, this organ expands horizontally into a broad, fleshy disc, by which the animal anchors itself, and thus secured, collects its food in the ripple of the waves.  On the slightest alarm, the water is discharged, the disc collapses into its original dimensions, and the shell and its inhabitant disappear together beneath the sand.]

[Illustration:  BULLIA VITTATA]

[Footnote 2:  Ianthina communis, Krause and I. prolongata, Blainv.]

[Illustration:  IANTHINA.]

The trade in shells is one of extreme antiquity in Ceylon.  The Gulf of Manaar has been fished from the earliest times for the large chank shell, Turbinella rapa, to be exported to India, where it is still sawn into rings and worn as anklets and bracelets by the women of Hindustan.  Another use for these shells is their conversion into wind instruments, which are sounded in the temples on all occasions of ceremony.  A chank, in which the whorls, instead of running from left to right, as in the ordinary shell, are reversed, and run from right to left, is regarded with such reverence that a specimen formerly sold for its weight in gold, but one may now be had for four or five pounds.  COSMAS INDICO-PLEUSTES, writing in the fifth century, describes a place on the west coast of Ceylon, which he calls Marallo, and says it produced “[Greek:  kochlious],” which THEVENOT translates “oysters;” in which case Marallo might be conjectured to be Bentotte, near Colombo, which yields the best edible “oysters” in Ceylon.[1] But the shell in question was most probably the chank, and Marallo was Mantotte, off which it is found in great numbers.[2] In fact, two centuries later Abouzeyd, an Arab, who wrote an account of the trade and productions of India, speaks of these shells by the name they still bear, which he states to be schenek[3]; but “schenek” is not an Arabic word, and is merely an attempt to spell the local term, chank, in Arabic characters.

[Footnote 1:  COSMAS INDICO-PLEUSTES, in Thevenot’s ed. t i. p. 21.]

[Footnote 2:  At Kottiar, near Trincomalie, I was struck with the prodigious size of the edible oysters, which were brought to us at the rest-house.  The shell of one of these measured a little more than eleven inches in length, by half as many broad:  thus unexpectedly attesting the correctness of one of the stories related by the historians of Alexander’s expedition, that in India they had found oysters a foot long.  PLINY says:  “In Indico mari Alexandri rerum auctores pedalia inveniri prodidere.”—­Nat.  Hist. lib. xxxii. ch. 31.  DARWIN says, that amongst the fossils of Patagonia, he found “a massive gigantic oyster, sometimes even a foot in diameter.”—­Nat.  Voy., ch. viii.]