The Nature Library

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Sea Snails

N. Virginea, Linn., West Indies to Brazil, has a beautifully polished shell with markings of white and Quaker drab and gray which are strikingly like the plumage of a Guinea fowl.

Some Neritinas resemble the slipper shells in form. Some add to the boat shape two wide lateral wings, doubling the width of the boat's seat. The animal is often as highly coloured as its shell, with broad foot, an enfolding mantle lining the shell's mouth, and long slender tentacles.

Genus NAVICELLA, Lam.

Shell oblong, limpet-like, apex on posterior margin, columellar shelf broad, not toothed, operculum shelly; nucleus lateral.

This genus of about fifty species is briefly mentioned here because its shells in a collection are likely to be referred to the limpets or the slipper shells, both of which they resemble. They come from the East Indies and Polynesia, where they live on floating sticks and roots of palm trees so as to be near the water.

N. Janelli, Recl., looks like half of a bivalve shell, roundish like a scallop, the beak at one end, Narrow longitudinal ridges are crossed by occasional lines of growth.