Excerpt from Our Country's Shells and How to Know Them: A Guide to the British Mollusca His book, like the rest of the series: is intended as an introductory working manual for the collector, the object of its analytical tables being to enable him to name any specimen in the British list without reading more than is needful for that one purpose. It is on the same principle as its predecessors. In the Flowers we dealt with a natural kingdom; in the Birds with a natural class, in the Butterflies and Moths with a natural order; in this volume we are dealing with a natural sub-kingdom, so that we have had an example of each Of the four highest systematic groups treated on the same plan. Every living species Of the sub-kingdom generally claimed as a native of our country is here sufficiently described to distinguish it from the rest, whether it has a shell or not; thus rather a wider range is covered than the main title would indicate, as many of the mollusca do not have shells. The coloured plates include all the species having shells, and these are drawn the size of life or enlarged in the case of those too small to be clearly shown and then their natural dimensions are given alongside. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.