292 ANIMAL SKETCHES. CHAI>. 



with the priceless gift of liberty. And as I wish to 

 examine him with you a little more fully and carefully 

 than we should find practicable while he still lives, we will 

 drop him into boiling water which will kill him quite 

 instantaneously and painlessly. 



When we take him out of the water he is probably a 

 good deal redder than when he was alive. You know that 

 the blue-black lobster becomes when he is boiled bright red. 

 Some people fancy that lobsters are always red ; and I 

 remember a picture, I think in the Academy, where some 

 fisher-folk were taking from the lobster pots, dripping 

 from the sea, boiled lobsters ! The bright red made a very 

 pretty bit of colour in the picture. I wonder how many of 

 those who passed by, catalogue in hand, recognized this 

 unwarrantable touch of art. You would have detected it 

 at once, I am sure ; and I say this not from a desire to 

 flatter you, but because I wish to put you in a good 

 humour with me, and get you to read on to the end of this 

 paper, even if you do not think it worth while to spend 

 fifteen pence on a crayfish for yourself. 



The crayfish is now cool enough to handle after his 

 fatal hot bath. Alternately bending and straightening the 

 tail we notice how beautifully its curved armour-plates 

 overlap, and how smoothly they work, one within the 

 other. Its lower surface we now see is much less perfectly 

 protected. There are only bars of hardened shell running 

 across the body and connected with the broad-plates 

 above. Between the bars there is tough flexible skin, 

 which is not easily pierced with a needle or the point of a 

 pen-knife. Attached to the outer edges of each bar 

 except the last, are small organs called swimmerets. You 

 may have noticed them in constant motion beneath the 

 tail when the crayfish was alive. If the crayfish be a male 

 the first two pairs are larger than the others, and curiously 



