ANIMAL AND PLANT LORE. 251 



gastroliths is stored away for the molting season a reservoir of 

 material to form a new shell. The children, having no knowledge 

 of the real use of the gastroliths, believe them to be a providen- 

 tial arrangement for the relief of pain in man, and for genera- 

 tions this belief has been entertained by adults, for the gastroliths 

 are really the commercial eye-stones that were once widely used to 

 remove any irritating particle from the eye ; but the practice is 

 now condemned by physicians. It is scarcely possible that there 

 is any power sui generis in these neat little bodies which an arti- 

 ficial f ac-simile would not possess. Very likely this widely credited 

 virtue of the eye-stones is a result of the varied use in medicine 

 of the European crayfish in past ages. Powdered gastroliths were 

 formerly used in Europe as an antacid, while Pliny cites a score 

 of prescriptions in which the crushed animal, the bruised flesh, 

 the juice expressed from it, macerations in various liquids, or the 

 incinerated and pulverized shell were recommended for all sorts 

 of purposes from antidoting poisons to allaying fevers. 



Some time ago I heard a very notable New England house- 

 keeper ask a young girl, who was assisting her by preparing a lob- 

 ster for the tea-table, if she had been careful to remove the "lady." 

 In answer to my inquiry as to what was meant by this, I was told 

 that there is a part known as the " lady" — a small, greenish object 

 inside the lobster, which is a perfect image of a tiny woman seated 

 in a chair — and that this part of the animal is deadly poison, and 

 should therefore always be carefully removed in preparing the 

 flesh for the table. I find that, in general throughout Massachu- 

 setts, this name of " lady " is given to the stomach, which may be 

 imagined to bear a remote resemblance to a miniature woman. 

 Since the lobster is a notorious sea-scavenger, the contents of the 

 stomach would probably be very undesirable for food, though why 

 this stigma of being poisonous should need to be attached to the 

 hard, calcareous-toothed, inedible stomach-walls it would not be 

 easy to tell. In central New Hampshire the name " lady " is some- 

 times applied to the intestine — the dark tube running lengthwise 

 of the lobster's body — and this is considered poisonous. In Cam- 

 bridge, Mass., an intelligent fish-dealer, on being questioned as to 

 the nature and position of the " lady " in the lobster, designated by 

 that name the edible ovary popularly called the " coral." An in- 

 genious theory has been propounded to me to explain the cause of 

 the so-called " lady " being dangerously poisonous. The reasoning 

 was about as follows: "You know that lobsters must be alive 

 when they are dropped into hot water to be cooked. If you should 

 let them die before they are cooked, they would be poison and not 

 fit to eat, and I suppose that the poison, which before they are 

 cooked is scattered everywhere through its whole body, all goes 

 into the " lady " while the lobster is being boiled." 



