260 NATURAL SCIENCE. April, 



species, in individuals. They are to be found almost everywhere, in 

 sand and seaweed, in well and pond, brook, river, and lake, high up 

 on mountains, deep down in oceans. They serve several useful 

 purposes in nature. They are rarely injurious in any way to man, and 

 never malignant towards his person. They are easy to handle, to 

 examine, to preserve. They can be promptly distinguished from all 

 other crustaceans by their organs of sight and breathing. From lordly 

 crab to lowly shrimp, all the crustaceans which in England we are 

 accustomed to eat have moveable stalked eyes. The eyes of Amphi- 

 poda are sessile. They usually have a pair. By exception they may 

 have four eyes, three eyes, one eye, or none ; but they never have 

 them mounted on jointed stalks. In this respect they agree with the 

 Cumacea and with the wood-lice and the rest of the Isopoda. But 

 from these again they are completely distinguished by their breathing 

 vessels of simple type attached to the appendages of the trunk. 

 From the higher Crustacea in general and from the Cumacea they are 

 further separated by a point of no little interest in comparative anatomy. 

 There is no difficulty in observing that a lobster, for instance, has 

 six pairs of jaws and five pairs of legs. But an Amphipod has four 

 pairs of jaws and seven pairs of legs. The fact undoubtedly is that 

 the two pairs of mouth-organs known as the second and third 

 maxillipeds in the lobster are equivalent to the two pairs of claw-like 

 feet known as the first and second gnathopods and attached to 

 independent segments of the trunk in the Amphipoda. In the seven 

 pairs of legs which the trunk of an Amphipod carries there is no 

 commonplace uniformity, but each pair exhibits some more or less 

 striking peculiarity of its own. Far from resembling a row of well- 

 disciplined oars, these several pairs point in all sorts of directions, up 

 and down, to front and rear, and to the sides. Hence, upon this 

 hitherto nameless group of animals, some eighty years ago, Latreille 

 imposed the name of Amphipoda, meaning " begirt with legs." As 

 an amphitheatre is surrounded with radiating avenues between its 

 tiers of seats, so have the legs of an Amphipod a manifold divergence, 

 for the various purposes of grasping, crawling, climbing, tube- 

 building, and maintaining the body's equilibrium. Unfortunately, 

 there is as yet no accepted or acceptable English equivalent for the 

 scientific designation of this Order. 



Of the works above mentioned, one is being published at 

 Christiania by Professor G. O. Sars. It aims at giving a fully 

 detailed account of the Amphipoda of Norway. These, it may be 

 said, are to a large extent the same as the Amphipoda of Great 

 Britain, and, what is more, the account of them is written in excellent 

 English. Can it be that the acute and learned author with prophetic 

 eye foresees a time when a reasonable number of people in England 

 will have been induced to care about Amphipoda, whether indigenous 

 or exotic ? No such faint and distant hope has influenced Professor 

 Delia Valle. Accordingly, he has composed his treatise on the 



