where, during our brief remaining stay, we visit a conchologist,
before which event we had no notion that Sicily was so rich in
shells. Two sides of a moderately large room are entirely devoted to
his collection. Here we saw a piece of wood nearly destroyed by the
_Teredo navalis_, or sailor's bore, who seems more active and
industrious here than elsewhere, and seldom allows himself to be
taken whole. Out of hundreds of specimens, three or four perfect ones
were all that this collector could ever manage to extract, the
molluscous wood-destroyer being very soft and fragile. His length is
about three inches, his thickness that of a small quill; he lodges in
a shell of extreme tenuity, and the secretion which he ejects is, it
seems, the agent which destroys the wood, and pushes on bit by bit
the winding tunnel. But his doings are nothing to the working of
another wafer-shelled bivalve, whose tiny habitations are so thickly
imbedded in the body of a nodule of _flint_ as to render its exterior
like a sieve, _diducit scopulos aceto_. What solvent can the chemist
prepare in his laboratory comparable to one which, while it dissolves
silex, neither harms the insect nor injures its shell. Amongst the
_fossils_ we notice cockles as big as ostrich eggs, clam-shells twice
the size of the largest of our Sussex coast, and those of oysters
which rival soup-plates. We had indeed once before met with them of
equal size in the lime-beds at _Corneto_. Judging by the _oysters_,
there must indeed have been _giants_ in those days. But this
collection was chiefly remarkable for its curious fossil remains of
_animals_ from _Monte Grifone_. In this same Monte Grifone, which we
went to visit, is one of the largest of the caves of bones of which
so many have been discovered--bones of various kinds, some of small,
some of very large animals, mixed together pell-mell, and
constituting a fossil paste of scarcely any thing besides. None of
the geologists, in attempting to explain these deposits, sufficiently