THE SNAILERY Intimate acquaintance with air-breathing mollusks can be cultivated only by bringing specimens from their native haunts into our own homes. Here they will be perfectly comfortable if their surroundings are made homelike. A snailery may well be a glass jar like the aquarium in size and shape. Put in a layer of woods earth three or four inches deep. Plant a few ferns or other woodsy things, and a clump of damp moss; sink a small dish of water in a corner, and screen the top to keep the snails from escaping. Stock this little molluscan terrarium with the snails common to your nearest woods. Feed them bits of tender lettuce, which out of season you can grow in a flower-pot. In the autumn the snailery may be set on a veranda where the feeling of approaching winter will cause the snails to go into hibernation, secreting a parchment doorway after burying themselves just under the leaf mould.
In June the eggs may be found in masses or ribbons in both aquarium and snailery. The development of the young snails is one of the most interesting things to watch. The modes of travel, eating habits, the use of the tentacles, foot, and other parts are best observed as the snails crawl on the glass sides of the jar. Few phenomena are more interesting than the prompt thrusting out of the jaw and toothed tongue of a hungry white lipped snail when it is offered a bit of cabbage or lettuce.
Carnivorous species in a snailery will devour the vegetable feeders. Keep watch for these, and exclude them. We have comparatively few of these, and a sharp lookout will soon discover the cannibals.