CHAPTER III 
SEA-SCORPIONS 
“ And some rin up the hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to 
pieces wi’ hammers like sae many road-makers run daft. They say ’tis to see 
how the warld was made.”—Scott, St. Ronan’s Well. 
Our first group of monsters is taken from a tribe of armed 
warriors that lived in the seas of a very ancient period in the 
world’s history. Like the crabs and lobsters inhabiting the 
coasts of Britain, they possessed a coat of armour, and jointed 
bodies, supplied with limbs for crawling, swimming, or seizing 
their prey. They were giants in their day, far eclipsing in size 
any of their relations that have lived on to the present time. 
Some of them, such as the Pterygotus (Fig. 6, p. 51), attaimed a 
length of nearly six feet. 
There are no living creatures quite like them. Certainly they 
are not true lobsters, and yet we may consider them to be first 
or second cousins of those ten-footed crustaceans’ of the present 
day—lobsters, crabs, and shrimps, so welcome on the tables of 
both rich and poor. Some naturalists say that their nearest 
relations at the present day are the king-crabs inhabiting the 
China seas and the east coast of North America; and there cer- 
tainly are some points of resemblance between them. Others say 
1 Crustaceans are a class of jointed creatures (articulate animals), possessing 
a hard shell or crust (Lat. crwsta), which they cast periodically. They all 
breathe by gills. 
