This creature is called the Chiton, and if you want to find it you must go and look on the piles at the end of a pier, or on the rocks which are left bare at very low tides. There you will often find it in hundreds. Generally it is ashy grey in colour, but it varies a good deal in hue, and you will sometimes find examples which are streaked and mottled with pink, and orange, and white, and lilac, and chocolate brown.

Before a chiton reaches its perfect form it passes through a kind of caterpillar stage, and then turns into a sort of chrysalis, just as an insect does. And both the caterpillar and the chrysalis, strange to say, have eyes upon their heads, while the perfect chiton has none. But some chitons have eyes all over their shells instead, and in some of these very odd creatures between eleven and twelve thousand eyes have been counted, the shells being almost entirely covered with them; so that the animals may really be said to see with their whole bodies!