162 A HISTORY OF RECENT CRUSTACEA 



coloured drawing supplied him by a friend ! Natural his- 

 tory would probably soon be enlivened by many miraculous 

 illustrations if it became lawful to construct a fauna upon 

 the sketches of friends, however trustworthy. It may here be 

 noticed that one of the most attractive figures in Herbst's 

 work is that of his Cancer megistos, afterwards called 

 Pagurus megistus, but of this Milne-Edwards observes that 

 it appears to be an imaginary species, the bulk of which 

 belongs to a Pagurus, while the fan-tail termination has 

 been taken from some lobster-like animal. Many of the 

 Pagurids are very beautifully coloured, but they are deci- 

 dedly weak about the tail. Just as the quarrymen in. old 

 days used to make Ammonites 'perfect' by carving the 

 front of the shell into a serpent's head, so no doubt some 

 Eastern artist made the really handsome Pagurus into a 

 perfect specimen by giving it what he thought a satisfactory 

 tail, regardless of the fact that such an ornament would 

 have made life impossible to the creature itself. He had 

 not before his eyes the fear of J. C. Fabricius, who winds 

 up his acknowledgments to his predecessors by the awe- 

 inspiring denunciation, ' damnandae vero memories John 

 Hill et Louis Renard, qui insecta ficta proposuere.' 



In regard to Pagurus striatus, Latreille, or, as it ought 

 perhaps rather to be called, Pagurus arrosor (Herbst), the 

 facts of distribution are noteworthy, since the specimens 

 taken in the Mediterranean, among the Philippine Islands, 

 and at Japan, show no points of distinction. When 

 JEupagurus excavatus was dredged among the Shetland 

 Isles, Canon Norman, though not then knowing it by its 

 right name, shrewdly suspected that it would prove to be 

 a deep-water Mediterranean form, and as Portunus tuber- 

 culatus, Roux, and the echinoderm Spatangus meridionalis, 

 Risso, had been dredged in the same locality, he takes 

 occasion to remark that ' all deep-water dredging seems 

 to establish this fact more clearly, that deep-water species 

 have a much more extended geographical range than 

 shallow-water and littoral forms. These Mediterranean 

 species must have made their way northwards in the abyss 

 of the sea round the western coast of Ireland, in which 



