Like a porcupine

Walter William Strickland, A discourse upon mountains and other essays, 1914, p.28.

..but the inherited instincts and internal bodily conformations that render it possible to digest and assimilate them, much as a caddis worm makes a net case like a porcupine, or a tube with a neat mosaic of grains of sand, according to combinations of inherited instincts and internal architecture.. which make it what it is. Thus natural selection after all is the sheep –dog which rounds in the sheep. At any rate, that is the orthodox view. Again we have seen that in the case of…