are hatched. No nutritive or other than a purely me- 

 chanical relationship subsists all this time between the 

 parent and its egg-clusters, the passing of its small brush- 

 like claws among them to rid them of any extraneously 

 derived substances, and the occasional fanning motion of 

 its swimmarets to increase the stream of oxygenated water 

 through and among the eggs, representing the sum-total of 

 attention they receive. 



The young animals that issue from the eggs of the 

 lobster are distinct in every way, including shape, habits, 

 and mode of locomotion, from the adult If, on the con- 

 trary, they were born like their parent, they would at once 

 sink to the bottom of the water in the immediate neigh- 

 bourhood of their birthplace ; the area of their distribution 

 under such conditions would be extremely limited, and 

 through close interbreeding, it may be anticipated that the 

 stock would become materially deteriorated. Nature, here, 

 however, as in the case of the great majority of marine in- 

 vertebrate animals, has provided her offspring with special 

 facilities for becoming distributed to long distances, their 

 bodies being so lightly constructed that their specific gravity 

 scarcely exceeds that of the fluid medium they inhabit, 

 while they are additionally provided with long feather-like 

 locomotive organs, with which they swim at or near the 

 surface of the water. As such essentially free-swimming, 

 pelagic animals, they now spend the entire first month or 

 six weeks of their existence, in which time, it is scarcely 

 necessary to state, they may be carried by the tides and 

 currents many miles away from their place of birth. During 

 this interval, however, the little lobsters by no means retain 

 their primitive shape ; their delicate chitinous skins, the 

 rudiment of the future shell, is constantly getting too tight 

 for them, and is thrown off to give place to a larger and 



