5 



Any one who has watched a shrimp in a small pool of salt 

 water will acknowledge this. Most shrimps are so semi- 

 transparent in water that it requires a practised eye to 

 observe them, but, once see a shrimp leisurely making its 

 way across a pool, thinking of nothing at all, and alarm that 

 shrimp by putting your walking stick in front of it, and you 

 will at once (but to see this you must have learned to watch 

 nature closely) see it raise its little black eyes, take a rapid 

 view of the ground in its rear, and with one flip of its 

 tail disappear stern foremost into the hole it has selected 

 for its place of refuge. 



The arched back of the crabs and lobsters prevent the 

 same thing occurring in their cases, but they yet derive a 

 very greatly increased scope of vision from their power of 

 thus protruding their eyes. Quite recently a specimen of a 

 little lobster-like creature, Scyllariis arctus (it is so rare in 

 English waters, except in Mount's Bay, that it has no 

 English name) has come into my possession which I have 

 preserved and have with me. It is worthy of notice, not 

 only because its eye is an exceedingly good example of the 

 "stalk-eye," but because I believe only three specimens 

 (two off Plymouth and one from the stomach of a cod 

 taken off Polperro) have been seen in England out of 

 Mount's Bay. In that bay I have secured some twenty 

 specimens, many alive and full of spawn ready to be shed, 

 as was the case with the specimen I have with me. There 

 is reason to believe that it was observed in Mount's Bay so 

 long ago as the middle of the last century ; but it is 

 distinctly a crustacean of the Mediterranean Sea. 



Confining myself now to these stalk-eyed crustaceans of 

 the sea, I may say that something over one-hundred species 

 have been recorded as having been observed in British 

 waters. A large proportion of these, perhaps one half, are 



