Colossal Shells.
One of these in particular has acquired a certain celebrity on account of its size and the peculiar use to which it has been put. It is the gigantic Tridacna, commonly known as the "font," because it is sometimes employed in churches to contain the sacred water. The great Tridacnæ, which are only detached from the rocks by cutting their cable with an axe, sometimes weigh more than five hundred pounds. The natives of the Molucca Islands eat them like we do oysters, to which they are analogous, and the flesh of one is a sufficient meal for twenty people. Their thick valves, which are sometimes five feet long, serve as troughs for the inhabitants, which nature offers ready cut and polished, and which they often use for feeding pigs, or convert into bath-tubs for their children. Buffon speaks of a shell, the diameter of which was equal to that of a carriage-wheel, and which was used for a mill-stone.