Note 10 — Chapter i · THE OLD WEEVILS

In this quiet inlet, collected by some eddy from the surrounding sea-bed and sunk to the bottom of the oozes, now turned into marl, there are stupendous deposits of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up Oysters eighteen inches long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could scoop up from this enormous heap Scallops, Coni,10 Cytheres,11 Mactræ,12 Murices,13 Turritellæ,14 Mitræ15 and others too numerous, too innumerable, to mention. You stand stupefied before the intense vitality of the days of old, which was able to supply us with such a mass of relics in a mere hole in the ground.