the most troublesome of these, if we may judge by the elaborate means which have been evolved for protection against them. Beetles, especially those of the family Carabida, are not outdone by a Provençal vintner in their appreciation of a toothsome Helix; and it is interesting to watch the celerity with which a beetle of the genus Cychrus or Dicælus eats a snail out of his shell.

Various organs have been modified or developed to prevent intruders from entering the aperture of the shell. In one group of land snails there is a calcareous plate, called the operculum, secreted upon the upper surface of the fleshy foot of the animal. This plate is the last part to enter the shell when the animal retracts itself, and it fits closely into the aperture, closing it like a valve or door. Examples of this structure are seen in the common Helicinas of America and the genus Cyclostoma of Europe.

FIG. 5.-ATOPA ACHATINA. Broken, to show the narrowness of the passage between the folds.

The majority of air-breathing snails, however, are far removed genealogically from the operculum-bearing group, belonging, indeed, to quite a different phylum in which the operculum has never been developed. Failing this, a completely different structure has been adapted to the same use. From the rim or lip around the aperture spring processes of the shell substance, projected into the opening of the shell and decidedly narrowing it. An example of this structure in its primitive form is seen in the three-toothed snail, Helix tridentata, and its allies. The projecting "teeth," as these processes are called (although they have nothing to do with the true mouth of the animal), are prominent enough to exclude the larger beetles, and insects sufficiently small to be admitted would be drowned in the viscid mucus or slime freely exuded by the snail.

More complex is the obstructing mechanism in many of the snails of the Southern States and of South America. In some species-the Caracolus labyrinthus of Panama, for example-one wonders how the snail himself can get in or out of his own shell, so tortuous is the passage. These Southern forms represent the highest development of the three-toothed type of aperture. The meaning of this increasing complexity appears, when we remember that the regions where the most complicated types of snails are found are known to be practically coincident with the regions producing carnivorous Coleoptera in the greatest numbers and the most exuberant variety of forms. The writer once confined in a box with carnivorous beetles a number of snails with strongly "toothed " apertures (Helix uvulifera) and a number hav

ing open, unprotected apertures (Helix clausa).* The former were found to be alive after several days, but the unprotected snails were eaten from their shells during the first night.

From tropical America we will now follow a great circle half round the globe, pausing in India or Ceylon. Here, too, the snails are exposed to the conditions of free competition for life in a tropical climate. What structures have been evolved in this. totally dissimilar snail-fauna, corresponding to the evolutionproducts of American life under similar climatic conditions? As we would expect on a priori grounds, the protective structures, while strictly analogous, are in no way homologous, having arisen wholly independently in the two hemispheres. The Asiatic snails, instead of developing projecting teeth upon the edge of the aperture, have a system of calcareous blades or folds situated a distance within the shell, behind which the animal retreats when needful. The figures tell, better than any description, the extreme degree of complication which has been attained by the more highly organized forms. Beetles have occasionally been found sticking in the interstices of the folds, unable either to force their way into the interior or to extricate themselves and retreat.

The culminating point in the series of obstructive structures is perhaps reached by the narrow-throated snail of China (Stegodera angusticollis). In this bizarre form, the last of the spiral

FIG. 6.-CHINESE NARROW-THROATED SNAIL.

whorls is distorted and crowded against the preceding volution, producing an extremely narrow passage into the more spacious interior, as shown in the figure.

But, in spite of these various expedients for the protection of the snail, they have some enemies able to overcome or to evade all obstacles. It is sad to learn that in this case, too, civil wars are the bloodiest; the most The narrow throat is shown by the dotted deadly of the "malacophagi” are brother snails of the genera Selenites and Glandina. When the hungry Selenites discovers a temptingly juicy snail, a Helicina perhaps, the victim retreats into his shell, barring the entrance with his strong door or operculum. The Selenites thereupon sets to work cutting a hole through the large whorl of the Helicina, in order to gain entrance behind the barricade. The tongue-like odontophore with

line.

*The Helix uvulifera is a Southern, the other a Northern species.

which the mouth of the Selenites is provided acts like a file, being beset with minute teeth, each of the shape and sharpness of a bayonet; so that the cutting of a hole through the shell is only a question of time. Presently the shell wall is broken through, and Selenites feasts upon Helicina served raw on the shell.

So life is not without its tragic side, even with creatures so lowly organized as these!

THE ENVIRONMENT OF GRECIAN CULTURE.

THE

BY GEORGES PERROTT.

HE more closely we study the works of the ancient Greeks, and penetrate the secret of the thought which they loved to conceal under the veil of symbol and myth, the more plainly we recognize that their wise men half-saw by a kind of rapid divination many of the truths which have been demonstrated to modern philosophy only by series of methodically connected observations and experiments. There are few among the present theories of Nature, its forces and laws, of which some hint does not appear to have occurred, for a moment at least, to some of the philosophers of Ionia, Sicily, or continental Greece. In the study of man as living in society, or as what Aristotle calls the political animal, they pushed the rigor and subtilty of their analysis very far. How precisely Thucydides described the chronic or acute maladies of the moral sense and the changes it underwent, as at Corcyra amid revolutions that confused all established notions, and at Athens, when a fatal epidemic, offering the prospect of inevitable and immediate death to every one, impelled it to break from all constraint, and excited a thirst for pleasures to which there could be no immediate satisfaction!

The Greeks should also be credited with having outlined the doctrine that now holds the highest place in what we call the philosophy of history, of the influence exercised by the medium upon a race and a people. That theory, usually ascribed to Montesquieu, was foreseen by Aristotle, who accounted for the superiority of his countrymen by the intermediate position which Greece occupied between the cold regions of northern Europe and the warm countries of Asia; whereby, he said, the Greeks combined the energy of the northern barbarians with the mental vivacity of the Asiatics. The same doctrine was in fact presented a century earlier by Hippocrates, in his treatise on Air, Water, and Places, in which the last twelve chapters are occupied with it. Summarizing the results of a comparison between

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Europe, or Greece, and Asia, and accounting for the differences he has determined, he says: "You will find as a rule that the form of the body and the disposition of the mind correspond to the nature of the country. . . . All that the earth produces is conformed to the earth itself," understanding the term earth in its most comprehensive sense, and regarding in its definition less the configuration and qualities of the surface than those of the climates that prevail and modify the fauna and flora. "If Asiatics," he affirms, "are of a more gentle and less warlike nature than Europeans, the cause lies chiefly in the equability of their seasons." And further, "A perpetual uniformity fosters indolence; a variable climate gives activity to the body and the soul."

We shall therefore only be following the counsel and the example of the great minds of Greece if we seek, in studying its history, to ascertain how and how far the character of its people has been affected by the action of "the air, the water, and the place." In our inquiry into the character of the medium in which the tribes called Hellenes in the eighth century before the Christian era were developed, we have enjoyed the advantage of a long residence in Greece, during which we have observed the people in their struggles with a Nature which gives nothing without being paid down, in labor of mind and muscle.

The peoples who figured in history before the Greeks, occupied territories clearly defined by Nature. Egypt was the lower part of the valley of the Nile, and did not extend materially beyond it. Chaldeo-Assyrian civilization was developed in the spacious basin of the Euphrates and Tigris; a much larger field, but still one that had definite boundaries-in the Taurus Mountains on the north, the rampart of the Zagros on the east, the Persian Gulf on the south, and the Arabian and Syrian Deserts on the west. The Phoenicians, indeed, had more than one capital, and carried their trade through all the then known world, but their capitals succeeding one another, each received its knowledge and art from the one that preceded it, and gave them to the one that followed it, and their intercourse with the world was animated by the commercial spirit only. Their industry never drew its inspiration from an intense and vigorous living art; and all that was essential in them was the product of the narrow strip of land between the sea and Mount Lebanon. All Hebrew art was restricted to a still narrower area in the circuit of Jerusalem and the little kingdom that depended upon it. There were other peoples in western Asia and Asia Minor who made their influence felt abroad: but within themselves each formed a compact mass, inhabiting a concrete portion of the continent, and it is within that limited territory that we have to look for evidences of their genius and work.

Greece, on the contrary, was multiple and diverse in space and in time. The name is more particularly applied to the easternmost of the peninsulas that the European continent projects into the Mediterranean toward Africa, in which the Grecian race, while it spread itself widely abroad, was most compactly settled; in which its cities of greatest influence and most immortal fame were built; and where were celebrated the Olympian, Isthmian, and Nemean games, to which all the scattered members of the Hellenic family periodically resorted. But, besides the peninsula of Hellas, as it was called, there were other Grecian lands, less eminently conspicuo us, perhaps, which also performed their part, and that not an unimportant one, in the general movement of the race. There was Asiatic Greece, which by virtue of its brilliant and supple genius was more precocious than European Greece; which engaged first in the flights of poetry and art, and in general and distant voyages. There was a Greece in Africa, at Naucratis and the other cities among the mouths of the Nile, and in Cyrenaica cities, protected by the desert against invasion, and with its caravan-roads radiating in every direction into the interior, made it as a door opening toward the mysteries of the Southern continent. Thence a curiosity constantly on the alert brought data by means of which the limits of the known world were pushed further back, and the idea of the variety of men and climates was fostered.

On the opposite shores were the Grecian colonies fringing the gulfs and promontories of southern Italy, with their advanced posts pushed to the coasts of Gaul and Spain. They had the honor of being the earliest educators of Rome; and the monuments of architecture and sculpture which they have left are no less beautiful than those which originated on the soil of the mother-country. Between these Grecian lands, forming four welldefined groups on the mainland, each of which had its distinct existence, there was an insular Greece in the sea, including Sicily, the islands of the Adriatic, the islands south and east of HellasCythera, Crete, the Cyclades and Sporades, Rhodes, Cyprus, Chios, Lesbos, the islands near Thrace, and many others, large and small. Men and merchandise, raw materials and manufactured goods, sacred images with the ideas and feelings they represented, the products of industry, and plastic types, were circulated and exchanged among these colonies with extraordinary facility; and happy meetings and fruitful contacts occurred in these hospitable archipelagoes, between Greeks and barbarians, and between Greeks of different stocks.

The race that was developed in this fortunate situation, favored by circumstances and by the medium in which it grew up, was perhaps the best endowed one that has participated in the