The water in which they settled must have been quite still, or these little delicate creatures would have been ground into powder--or rather into paste.

Therefore learned men soon made up their minds that these things were laid down at the bottom of a deep sea, so deep that neither wind, nor tide, nor currents could stir the everlasting calm.
Ah! it is worth thinking over, for it shows how shrewd a giant Analysis is, and how fast he works in these days, now that he has got free and well fed;--worth thinking over, I say, how our notions about these little atomies have changed during the last forty years.
We used to find them sometimes washed up among the sea-sand on the wild Atlantic coast; and we were taught, in the days when old Dr.Turton was writing his book on British shells at Bideford, to call them Nautili, because their shells were like Nautilus shells.

Men did not know then that the animal which lives in them is no more like a Nautilus animal than it is like a cow.
For a Nautilus, you must know, is made like a cuttlefish, with eyes, and strong jaws for biting, and arms round them; and has a heart, and gills, and a stomach; and is altogether a very well-made beast, and, I suspect, a terrible tyrant to little fish and sea-slugs, just as the cuttlefish is.

But the creatures which live in these little shells are about the least finished of Madam How's works.

They have neither mouth nor stomach, eyes nor limbs.