Definition of "conchology"

"Thank goodness, I am not a child," said Lady Mandeville, turning over a collection of those juvenile tomes, which are to make the rising generation so much wiser than their grandfathers or grandmothers—catechisms of conchology, geology, mathematical questions for infants, geography, astronomy; "the child may be 'father to the man;' but the said father must have had some trouble with his offspring."

1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter VI, in Romance and Reality. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], page 94

The least dreadful among the essays stacked and waiting to be corrected would be that of young Master Jefferson Davis, who when imprisoned by Andrew Johnson in 1866 will ask his physician at Fortress Monroe to procure a few volumes of "conchology, geology, or botany," he desiring to commune with the interests of more innocent days.

2011, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead