GREAT CRAB. 



65 



form and materials as the others, but considerably larger. 

 They are conveyed to great distances, as far, for instance, 

 as from the coast of Norway to the Billingsgate Market, 

 in well boxes, which are of wood, very strongly construct- 

 ed, and with holes in all the sides to admit of continual 

 change of water, as the boxes are drawn through the sea, 

 attached to the vessel. 



The male Crabs are esteemed the best for the table ; 

 they are generally larger than the females, and the claws 

 are much heavier. They often weigh eight or nine pounds, 

 and sometimes as much as twelve pounds. 



Examples are not few of the occurrence of different spe- 

 cies of Crustacea in armorial bearings. Prawns, Crayfish, 

 Lobsters, and Crabs, are occasionally found, and these, not 

 only as '■'canting" bearings, or puns upon the name of the 

 bearers, b^^t often as examples of that emblematical allu- 

 sion in which the heralds of former times so much delight- 

 ed. This is not, perhaps, the place to enter into much 

 serious disquisition on the utility of such a custom ; and 

 yet one can scarcely read the quaint, but wholesome mo- 

 ralities, of good old Guillim. and other professors of the 

 gentle science, without some misgivings that the matter-of- 

 fact and prosaic scorn of such emblems, which has suc- 

 ceeded to the more poetical — may we not also say the 

 happier credulity of olden time, may have given us no 

 equivalent advantage for the loss of those striking and 

 epigrammatic maxims. I shall venture, therefore, to in- 

 dulge an old fondness for this ancient, and really not un- 

 interesting " science," (I do not use the term in its modern 

 and critical sense,) by giving some occasional examples of 

 Crustacean Heraldry. And in doing this I cannot but 

 refer to Mr. Moule's " Heraldry of Fish," as a work not 

 less interesting in its historical and technical details, than 



