They were like the palaces of the Orient, dark and forbidding on the outside, glistening within like a lake of pearl.

Some received their terrestrial names because of the special form of their shell--the rabbit, the helmet, triton's horn, the cask, the Mediterranean parasol.
They were grazing with bucolic tranquillity on the maritime pasture lands, contemplated from afar by the mussels, the oysters, and other bi-valves, attached to the rocks by a hard and horny hank of silk that enwrapped their enclosures.

Some of these shells, called hams,--clams of great size, with valves in the form of a club,--had fixed themselves upright in the mire, giving the appearance of a submerged Celtic camp, with a succession of obelisks swallowed up by the depths of the sea.
The one called the date-shell can, assisted by its liquid acid, pierce the hardest stone with its cylindrical gimlet.

The columns of Hellenic temples, submerged in the Gulf of Naples and brought to light by an earthquake, are bored from one end to the other by this diminutive perforator.
Cries of surprise and nervous laughter suddenly reached Ferragut.

They came from that part of the Aquarium where the fish tanks were.