TWO CITIZEN CRABS OF NONSUCH 



Gecarcinus lateralis is a climber and has won a 

 place above the salt. Let us think of her early on a 

 summer morning curled tightly in the small cham- 

 ber at the end of her burrow. It is pitch dark, but 

 these small people of the earth have not yet dead- 

 ened their perceptions so that they have to renew 

 the youth of their senses by means of wires or wire- 

 less, bells and clocks. That is our prerogative. 



So somehow she knows it is dawn, and, as she is 

 not nearly as nocturnal as she is thought to be, 

 she scrambles sideways the three or four feet 

 to the sharp upward bend, and then up to the 

 outer world. The entrance is at the edge of a fifty- 

 foot cliff, and she can look down on the old ocean, 

 just as the wife of a successful Italian contractor 

 might drive down from Fifth Avenue and look 

 with lorgnette at Mott or Pell Street. She prob- 

 ably cannot hear the songs of the little vireos or 

 detect the scarlet and yellow of the goldfinches 

 looping past, but if she knew what conceit was she 

 could feel certain that she was a member of the 

 terrestrial, air-breathing FFN. But as so often 

 happens to those not to the manor born, at critical 

 moments a slip occurs, the horns and hoofs are for a 

 second's fraction exposed; so even with land crabs 

 there is a price to pay. Nature has decreed that for a 

 race of creatures to be worthy of such drastic prog- 

 ress, the young may not be born to all the shelter 

 and ease to which its parents have won, but must, 

 at least to a slight degree, go through the motions 

 of the transition from water to air. The salamander 



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