964 The Zoologist — November, 1867. 



The pretty little mauve-coloured one lay with its hind legs only con- 

 cealed, and its whole carapace level with the surrounding pebbles. 

 In all the specimens which I captured or saw, I noticed the tendency 

 to be perfectly motionless, with legs and arms tucked in under them 

 on being alarmed. They simulated rather the pebbles around them 

 than death in doing this. The colours of all my specimens have faded 

 in drying. 1 have kept them for reference. It is certain that none of 

 these were X. tuberculosa: it is equally certain that they intermingled 

 some of the distinctions usually considered specific between X. florida 

 and X. rivulosa. It is notoriously difficult to distinguish between 

 these two species. 1 at present incline to say that all my specimens 

 are X. florida in various stages of development, but the differences 

 existing in my various specimens prove the species worthy of careful 

 attention. 



The common shore crab [C. maenas) was very clever also in burying 

 itself in sand, using its broad and partly-finned hind legs as shovels; 

 and some of its larger and finer specimens showed a close approach 

 in these finned legs and feet to the true swimmers. 



The hairy porcelain crab (/-*. platycheles) is common here, as also 

 are of course lobster, crayfish, spinous spider-crab (.1/. Squinado) and 

 the common edible crab (0. Pa<jitnisi); of these last 1 obtained several 

 specimens in which the female had retired to a hole in the rocks to 

 cast her shell, and had been sought by the male, and 1 took the old 

 shell of the female, the female herself just hardening, and the male 

 crab in his old shell altogether. 



I do not know anything about Conchology, and therefore do not 

 know whether a shell identified for me by a friend as Murex pur- 

 purea is rare or otherwise ; but the fishermen here tell me that it has 

 not been seen on these shores for several years, and I can say of my 

 own knowledge that it came on this occasion in a large "school." 

 There was none on the beach up to Tuesday, September 3rd, but 

 there was a spell of fine weather, with a very smooth sea in that way, 

 and on Thursday, the 5th, the beach was strewed with the shell, per- 

 fect and broken, and in several specimens I secured the occupant 

 with the shell. Some days, however, before this I had picked up on 

 the sands a curious bladder-like substance, about an inch and a half 

 long, having three lobes, which I think I can identify with the bladder 

 of the M. purpurea divorced from its shell and exhausted of air, and 

 which, if I am correct, was a foreboder of the approach before the 

 wind of the shell from the southward. 



