]44 NATURAL HISTORY. 



men t characteristic of the rest, but is clothed by a membranous skin. This 

 p ar i is therefore extremely vulnerable, and hence the animal protects this 

 pari by inserting it in the deserted shell of some mollusc. So long has this 

 habil been followed that the abdomen has become distorted, and has taken 

 a spiral form. The form figured in our plate occurs in Europe as well as 

 on the American shores, and may be taken as the type of the nearly two 

 hundred known species. When young it inhabits a shell proportionate 

 to its size; but as it -rows it needs larger quarters, and many interesting 

 accounts haw been written of the hermit on his house-hunting expedi- 

 tions, or, better, of his search for a new cell. He goes about dragging his 

 oid shell with him, and turning over every empty shell he meets, apparently 

 sounding its depths and measuring its size with his stony claws. The 

 chances are that it does not suit him; it is either too large or too small, 

 and so he goes along until he finds another vacant tenement, which is 

 examined and measured as before. This time, perchance, it suits, and then 

 in an instant he leaves his old home and takes up his residence in the new, 

 moving with him being quickly performed, and lacking the inconveniences 

 and discomforts of our first of May. In the foreground of our plate this 

 transfer is represented in the very act. 



At times two hermits will find the same shell at the same time, and 

 then they show themselves close imitators of the doughty ' Friar Tuck,' 

 who proved himself a muscular hermit in the days of Robin Hood. Both 

 want the house, and neither will give in: whether they resort to words to 

 M'ttle their quarrel is uncertain; but no such doubt attends the fact that 

 they immediately proceed to blows. Pincers are flourished in the most 

 excited manner, nipping off here a feeler, there a leg, until at last one is 

 vanquished, and the other, unless too badly maimed, proceeds to occupy 

 the house which is his by right of conquest. 



In our latitudes all the hermits are marine; but in the tropics some 

 are terrestrial in their habits, dragging their heavy shells r over rocks and 

 sand in the open air, as do our northern forms beneath the sea. One of 

 these terrestrial forms, while a hermit in structure, is not so in fact. In 

 almost every feature it is like the forms living in shells; it is, however, 

 much larger than any of them, and since its abdomen is hardened, it does 

 not require to protect itself like the others. It is most abundant about the 

 palm-trees in the islands of the South Seas, and from this fact it receives 

 its common name palm-crab and cocoanut-crab : its scientific name is 

 Birgus. It makes its nest in burrows which it digs in the earth near the 

 shore, and inspired by a desire for softness or for warmth, it lines its hole 

 with the outer fibre of the cocoanut. Mr. Forbes, in his account of this 

 species in the Cocos-Keeling Islands, describes its habits in a way which 



