Hutchinson. — On Scincle Island. 221 



insects. He is a curious connecting-link between the spiders 

 and insects, and, though harmless with us, the family is much 

 dreaded from its poisonous bite in tropical countries. You 

 may also find a harmless member of another notoriously 

 poisonous branch of tbe spider family — the scorpions. It is- 

 a very tiny fellow, with a body scarcely -Jin. in length; the 

 same formidable nippers of tbe scorpion, but devoid of the 

 lengthened stinging tail. It is fitly named a pseudo- 

 scorpion — Obisium, sp. 



Most of the Crustaceans are water-animals, only a few 

 having adopted the dry land as a habitat ; and then it is 

 usually in damp shady places that we find them. I think of 

 the land Crustaceans the best known to most of us is the 

 common slater, or woodlouse. Now, you never find a wood- 

 louse in dry open ground ; it is always under some form of 

 shelter — firewood, old sacks, dead leaves (or the living masses 

 of our garden plants), always under something that gives 

 dampness and coolness. In the Sturm's Gully mould you 

 will find two species — one the familiar, dull, armoured im- 

 ported slater, the other a smoother, shinier animal, a native 

 species. Like the shells, one may follow the family out to 

 the habitat of their primal ancestor, the sea. The slater 

 pauses under the stones at the gully's mouth, and goes no 

 further seaward ; but under the rocks that are splashed by 

 the spray of high tide you will find a slimmer more active 

 member of the slater family, with the shining armour of the 

 native slater, but with long antennae drooping backwards 

 over its segments and a pair of tail-like appendages nearly the 

 length of the body. 



Lastly, in the pools left by the tide on the shores of the 

 Inner Harbour, and working right up into the brackish water 

 of the sea-creeks, is a pretty little yellow Crustacean, broader, 

 shorter, and shallower than either of these others, whose 

 hinder segments are furnished with lobes, with which it 

 swims with considerable rapidity. It curls itself up into the 

 same protecting roll as do its land representatives. 



Of the crabs proper we have the countless hosts of little 

 brown-green fellows that haunt the shallows of the harbour, 

 besides numerous species on the open coast. About the 

 handsomest of these last is a great purple-and-pink fellow 

 that you may see occasionally as he vanishes with a rattle of 

 arms into the rugged caves of the tide-touched limestone 

 boulders of the Sturm's Gully beach. 



It is a far cry from the vertebrate rat to the invertebrate 

 crab that he devours, and from the crab to the primal life- 

 form as a blob of jelly is farther still, so I will leave the lower 

 forms for another paper by abler hands than mine. 



