May Have Filled Magic Casements.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19122, 15 July 1930, Page 6

May Have Filled Magic Casements.

Nature Notes.

By

James Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.S.

A T A charity bazaar in Vancouver a short time ago, a lady bought some very beautiful artificial flowers made from shells. She was told that the shells were imported from France to be made into flowers. Coming to stay with friends at Waihiki, Auckland Province, last summer, she was surprised to find the same sort of shells on the beach there.

The valves of these shells are so delicate, thin and fragile that they look like frosted window-glass. Sometimes they *tre almost transparent. For this reason, the shells are known popularly as window-shells. They are also, on account of their shape, saddleoysters, and, being unpalatable, bitter-oys-ters. Window-shells that live in shallow water in the Bay of Islands are famed for their beautiful golden valves. Those dredged on the Coromandel coast in twenty fathoms are almost transparent. They have hardly any colour. When window-shells are young, they have a brilliant lustre. Grown-ups shine, faintly outwardly, but in the interior the left pane of the window is iridescent, white, or pink and yellow. This species of shells, coming down unchangeably through the long ages since at least late in the Tertiary Era, may have filled Keats’s magic casements opening on to the foam of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn.