126 UTILIZATION OP MINUTE LIFE. 



Crustacean perhaps of the prawn itself. Be that 

 as it may, the section of Isopoda presents a wide 

 field of experimental research, from the wood-louse, 

 Oniscus murarius, which used to enter into the 

 composition of certain quack pills, upwards. 



Let us now turn to the family of crabs. Our 

 large edible crab (Cancer pagurus, L.} is taken upon 

 the rocky coasts of Great Britain, Ireland, and 

 Western Europe; it is rarely met with on sandy 

 coasts, such as the littoral of Flanders. Pennant 

 says that it casts its shell every year between 

 Christmas and Easter ; but Lyell, in his " Principles 

 of Geology," says that a crab taken in April, 1832, 

 on the English coast, had its shell covered with 

 oysters of six years' growth ; hence it was concluded 

 that this crab could not have moulted for six 

 years. 



Like other Crustacea, it is probable that the 

 crab moults once a year in its younger days, but 

 it has not been ascertained at what period this 

 moulting ceases. 



As to artificial breeding and rearing, I shall refer 

 to what has been said of lobsters and crawfish. 



Cancer mcenas, L., is a much smaller and less- 

 esteemed edible crab, common on our coasts. A 

 still smaller species is the pea crab (Pinnotheres 

 pisum), which is about the size of a spider; it is 

 found sometimes, in the month of November, living 



