162 A HISTORY OF RECENT CRUSTACEA 
coloured drawing supplied him by a friend! Natural his- 
tory would probably soon be enlivened by many miraculous 
illustrations if it became lawful to construct a fauna upon 
the sketches of friends, however trustworthy. It may here be 
noticed that one of the most attractive figures in Herbst’s 
work is that of his Cancer megistos, afterwards called 
Pagurus megistus, but of this Milne-Edwards observes that 
it appears to be an imaginary species, the bulk of which 
belongs to a Pagurus, while the fan-tail termination has 
been taken from some lobster-like animal. Many of the 
Pagurids are very beautifully coloured, but they are deci- 
dedly weak about the tail. Just as the quarrymen in old 
days used to make Ammonites ‘ perfect’ by carving the 
front of the shell into a serpent’s head, so no doubt some 
Kastern artist made the really handsome Pagurus into a 
perfect specimen by giving it what he thought a satisfactory 
tail, regardless of the fact that such an ornament would 
have made life impossible to the creature itself. He had 
not before his eyes the fear of J. C. Fabricius, who winds 
up his acknowledgments to his predecessors by the awe- 
inspiring denunciation, ‘damnande vero memorize John 
Hill et Louis Renard, qui insecta ficta proposuere.’ 
In regard to Pagurus striatus, Latreille, or, as it ought 
perhaps rather to be called, Pagurus arrosor (Herbst), the 
facts of distribution are noteworthy, since the specimens 
taken in the Mediterranean, among the Philippine Islands, 
and at Japan, show no points of distinction. When 
Kupagurus excavatus was dredged among the Shetland 
Isles, Canon Norman, though not then knowing it by its 
right name, shrewdly suspected that it would prove to be 
a deep-water Mediterranean form, and as Portunus tuber- 
culatus, Roux, and the echinoderm Spatangus meridionalis, 
Risso, had been dredged in the same locality, he takes 
occasion to remark that ‘all deep-water dredging seems 
to establish this fact more clearly, that deep-water species 
have a much more extended geographical range than 
shallow-water and littoral forms. These Mediterranean 
species must have made their way northwards in the abyss 
of the sea round the western coast of Ireland, in which 
