July, 1896. THE LOBSTER. 39 



supply. The females carrying the extruded eggs on their swim- 

 merets are rather ludicrously spoken of as ' berried hens.' The sale 

 of these has sometimes been prohibited for short portions of the year. 

 Recently, however, it has been ascertained that the eggs are thus 

 carried for many months, with the result that a prohibition of 

 bringing ' berried hens ' to market at any time is now recommended. 

 Regulations can rarely be made perfectly logical. Under that pro- 

 posed, a lobster with the ' coral ' still in its ovaries would be saleable, 

 although it is as much the potential mother of millions as one with 

 the eggs already extruded. But rules too stringent might destroy the 

 industry they are intended to foster, while within due limits they may 

 at least have an educational value. 



To repair the ravages of waste, the artificial hatching of lobster- 

 spawn is now being carried out with increasing success. Dr. 

 Herrick's laborious and prolonged investigations enable him to give a 

 fuller account than has hitherto been presented of the numerous 

 moults and larval stages which intervene between the birth of the 

 lobster and its adult condition. During the first three stages the 

 larva is a ' schizopod,' the schism of the feet from which this title is 

 derived supplying it with half-a-dozen pairs of double-branched 

 appendages of the trunk. In these, one branch is adapted for swim- 

 ming, the other is prepared for walking or grasping. Only in the 

 fourth stage do the swimming-branches practically disappear, when 

 the swimming-apparatus of the abdomen or tail is ready at length to 

 take up the function which the trunk now lays down. The early 

 forms, with their translucent cuticle, have means and opportunity of 

 displaying changeful and agreeable colours. Later on, when the 

 animal is an inch or more in length and the shell no longer trans- 

 parent, there are brilliant hues of green and brown, and blue and 

 white, due wholly to the pigments of the shell, and no longer, as at an 

 earlier period, in part to the colouring of the internal organs. Among 

 the adults, " occasionally red living lobsters are seen," though they 

 are rarely as bright as those which have been boiled. 



From a careful weighing of the evidence in regard to the size 

 attained by lobsters. Dr. Herrick estimates that the greatest weight 

 is about twenty-five pounds. At the |)rice not uncommonly asked in 

 England of a shilling a pound, a specimen of that weight would be 

 expensive, though forty years ago, at Grand Manan, in the United 

 States, it might have been had for a penny. The largest number of 

 eggs carried by a female is supposed to approach, without quite 

 reaching, a hundred thousand, about a pound weight of ' berries.' A 

 female stripped of her eggs is likely to weigh less, it is said, than a 

 female of the same length that has had no eggs of which to be 

 stripped. 



The differences between the European and American lobster are 

 not considerable. Among them it may be noted that on the average 

 the American is the larger, and that it has teeth on the underside of 



