CHAPTER Wie 
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.”—S¢. 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. 1, p. 26), attained a length of nearly 
six feet. They belonged to the humbler ranks of life, and, if now 
living, would without doubt be assigned, by fishmongers ignorant 
of natural history, to that vague category of “‘shell-fish ” in which 
they include crabs, lobsters, mussels, etc. 
These lobster-like creatures, though ciaiming no relationship 
with the higher ranks of animals, may well engage our attention, 
not only for their great size, but also for their strange build. 
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 
1 Crustaceans are a class of jointed creatures (articulate animals), possess- 
ing a hard shell or crust (Lat. erusta), which they cast periodically. They 
all breathe by gills. 
