Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are they poking, snapping,
starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over each other, rattling about
the huge mahogany cockles, as big as a child's two fists, out of
which they are protruded? Mark them well, for you will perhaps
never see them again. They are a Mediterranean species, or rather
three species, left behind upon these extreme south-western coasts,
probably at the vanishing of that warmer ancient epoch, which
clothed the Lizard Point with the Cornish heath, and the Killarney
mountains with Spanish saxifrages, and other relics of a flora
whose home is now the Iberian peninsula and the sunny cliffs of the
Riviera. Rare on every other shore, even in the west, it abounds
in Torbay at certain, or rather uncertain, times, to so prodigious
an amount, that the dredge, after five minutes' scrape, will
sometimes come up choked full of this great cockle only. You will
see hundreds of them in every cove for miles this day; a seeming
waste of life, which would be awful, in our eyes, were not the
Divine Ruler, as His custom is, making this destruction the means
of fresh creation, by burying them in the sands, as soon as washed
on shore, to fertilize the strata of some future world. It is but
a shell-fish truly; but the great Cuvier thought it remarkable
enough to devote to its anatomy elaborate descriptions and
drawings, which have done more perhaps than any others to
illustrate the curious economy of the whole class of bivalve, or
double-shelled, mollusca. (Plate II. Fig. 3.)

That red capsicum is the foot of the animal contained in the
cockleshell. By its aid it crawls, leaps, and burrows in the sand,
where it lies drinking in the salt water through one of its
siphons, and discharging it again through the other. Put the shell
into a rock pool, or a basin of water, and you will see the siphons