SEA TURTLES 233

been seen to catch birds and fish, so quick is he in
movement. The fresh-water turtles have a much
flatter shell, and they are all carnivorous in habit and
tropical in habitat. Their shell is covered with skin,
and their jaws have fleshy lips, and their snout ends
in a tube, so that they can breathe with everything
but the tip of their nose under water. The sea
turtles are of more importance than all the rest from
a commercial point of view. One of them is the
hawk’s bill, whose epidermic plates furnish the
tortoiseshell that is made into combs and used so
much for inlaying, the best of which is imported into
China from Celebes. Another is the green turtle,
Chelone viridis, whose fate, both clear and thick, is
soup ; his carapace or ‘upper shell’ yielding ‘cali-
pash,’ his ‘under shell’ or plastron yielding ‘calipee.’
All the marine turtles are edible, both in flesh and
eggs, but while C. wrzdzs is especially associated
with the alderman, the others are only fully appre-
ciated by the shipwrecked sailor. All the chelonians
lay eggs, most of them having hard calcareous
shells, and all of them are left to be hatched by the
sun.

The chelonians are a very old family—their repre-
sentatives have been found as deep in the far past as
the Permian ; but, indeed, all the reptiles have long
pedigrees. They used literally to swarm on the face
of the earth, and if we were merely to describe at any
length the many species of the five orders-—Axomo-
dontia, Sauropterygia, Ichthyopterygea, Dinosauria,
Oruithosauria—now only known as fossils, we should
more than fill this book.