THE SNAIL'S WONDERFUL MOUTH.
By New York Sun
It is a fortunate thing for man and the rest of the animal kingdom that no large wild animal has a mouth constructed with the devouring apparatus built on the plan of the insignificant looking snail's mouth, for that animal could out-devour anything that lives. The snail itself is such an entirely unpleasant, not to say loathsome, creature to handle that few amateur naturalists care to bother with it, but by neglecting the snail they miss studying one of the most interesting objects that come under their observation. Anyone who has noticed a snail feeding on a leaf must have wondered how such a soft, flabby, slimy animal can make such a sharp and clean-cut incision in the leaf, having an edge as smooth and straight as if it had been cut with a knife. That is due to the peculiar and formidable mouth he has. The snail eats with his tongue and the roof of his mouth. The tongue is a ribbon which the snail keeps in a coil in his mouth. This tongue is in reality a band saw, with the teeth on the surface instead of on the edge. The teeth are so small that as many as 30,000 of them have been found on one snail's tongue. They are exceeding sharp, and only a few of them are used at a time. Not exactly only a few of them, but a few of them comparatively, for the snail will probably have 4,000 or 5,000 of them in use at once. He does this by means of his coiled tongue. He can uncoil as much of this as he chooses, and the uncoiled part he brings into service. The roof of his mouth is as hard as bone. He grasps the leaf between his tongue and that hard substance, and, rasping away with his tongue, saws through the toughest leaf with ease, always leaving the edge smooth and straight. By use the teeth wear off or become dull. When the snail finds that this tool is becoming blunted, he uncoils another section and works that out until he has come to the end of the coil. Then he coils the tongue up again and is ready to start in new, for while he has been using the latter portions of the ribbon, the teeth have grown in again in the idle portions—the saw has been filed and reset, so to speak—and while he is using them, the teeth in the back coil are renewed.—New York Sun.