150 AN APPETIZING FACT. 



culated, perhaps, to give rise to any very appetizing reflections on 

 the part of those who think with Pennant that the animal 

 affords the " most delicious " fare of all the Crustacea, and yet 

 useful to be known. People who want to get the skeletons of 

 small birds or other animals perfectly freed from the flesh, fre- 

 quently put them into ants' nests, but the end may be gained 

 just as well by mooring them in the sea where the Shrimps are 

 known to congregate. The naturalists of the Arctic expeditions 

 have frequently profited by the knowledge of this fact, and by 

 placing beneath the ice the specimens of which they wished 

 to have the skeletons preserved, have had them rapidly pre- 

 pared as they desired by the myriads of small Crustacea living 

 there. 



Whether the sense of hearing is as well developed in these 

 long-tailed Crustaceans as the sense of smell, it is not so easy to 

 determine ; but in their near allies the Lobsters, there is every rea- 

 son to believe that the one sense is fully as acute as the other. 

 Mr. Belt, in his History of the British Crustacea, says that these 

 animals will sometimes throw off their limbs at the report of a 

 cannou, and in a thunderstorm whole cargoes of them have been 

 known, to do the same, to the great detriment of their marketable 

 value. But the best illustration of the fact is that given in the 

 following story of an old fisherman of Govran Haven in Cornwall, 

 a story, however, which it must be confessed has a somewhat apo- 

 cryphal air, though it certainly deserves to be true : One day, 

 going the round of his crab-pots, the man saw a number of young 

 Lobsters swarming together. He watched them for some time 

 without attracting the attention of an old one which, lodged in a 

 hollow of the rock, seemed to be keeping guard over the young 

 ones at play. No sooner, however, did the old Lobster perceive 

 there was danger near, than it rattled its claws together, as if to 

 sound an alarm, and they all fled to their holes ! 



Intermediate between the long-tailed Crustaceans and those 

 whose caudal extremity is cwr-tailed, there is a group of these 

 animals with tails that are strictly speaking neither long nor 

 short exclusively, and which, therefore, stands christened in the 

 text-books as the Anomura, or irregular tails. 



Let nobody think meanly of these worthies ; they supply the 

 Aquarium with its most amusing occupants. 



Oversights and mistakes or practical jokes are hardly likely to 



