274 NOTES ON BOPYRUS SQU1LLARUM. 



The appearance of the ordinary edihle prawn is familiar to all, 

 and its elegant and vivacious movements in the Aquarium have 

 delighted and amused thousands of observers, to say nothing of its 

 gastronomic qualifications, which appear to have been appreciated, if 

 not entirely understood, in Shakespeare's time, for Hostess Quickly 

 says to Falstaff in the Second part of King Henry IV., " Did 

 not goodwife Keetch, the butcher's wife, come in then and call 

 me Gossip Quickly ? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; telling 

 me she had a good dish of prawns ; whereby thou didst desire to eat 

 some ; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound ?" 



Without going too much into technical details it is sufficient to 

 say that the prawn consists anteriorly of a chitinous shield or 

 carapace, from which extends a rostrum armed with seven or eight 

 teeth. The animal has three pairs of antennae — the external 

 ones being very long — half as long again as the animal itself 

 from the tail to the extremity of the rostrum. The eyes are 

 large, round, and projecting. It has five pairs of thoracic feet, two 

 of which are furnished with chelae or nippers for prehension, the 

 second pair being much the larger and stronger. Beneath these are 

 the jaws (maxillipedes) and a wonderful alimentary apparatus for food 

 crushing and filtering, which has been minutely described by Professor 

 Huxley in an allied form in his magnificent monograph " The 

 Crayfish." The remaining three pairs of feet are devoted to 

 purposes of walking. These limbs carry eight respiratory gills 

 (podobranchiae) attached to the basal joint, and placed under 

 cover of the carapace. Posteriorly the prawn has six movable 

 abdominal segments (or somites), the last one (or telson) termi- 

 nating in a triangular joint, to which are attached on either side 

 two laminse furnished with hairs, forming the tail. These segments 

 carry anteriorly five pairs of swimmerets, " which are used like 

 paddles when the animal swims quickly." The ova find lodgment 

 on these limbs. As is very well known, the prawn and its congeners 

 are subject to periodic moults. Notwithstanding its comparatively 

 small size and slender figure it would, I think, be difficult to conceive 

 an animal better adapted by the shapes and positions of its organs to 

 fulfil its functions — the delicate, long, and sensitive antennae used as 

 organs of touch, and perhaps of smell, the prominent compound eyes 

 with a wide range of vision, the strong-toothed rostrum projecting 

 from the stout carapace for poking about for food in the crevices and 

 crannies of rocks, the nimble hands for seizing it, the graceful and 

 active walking and swimming feet, the muscular segmented body and 

 tail adapted for darting through the water and enabling the prawn 

 when in full health to evade, perhaps, most of its enemies, except man 

 with his prowling " shrimp net." The organism is greatly but not 

 completely in harmony with the environment. And from the fact that 

 it delights in a habitat between tide marks, it has acquired, as any 

 observer may have noticed in watching the movements of prawns 

 frequenting rock pools, an intelligence and boldness that must aid it 



