2352 The Zoolooist — November, 1870. 



Our traveller now lands on a projecting point on the eastern side of 

 the Gulf of Liau-tung, forty miles north of Hulu-shan Bay, where ter- 

 minates the Great Wall of China, that " wonder of the world." Here 

 the exploring party left their boat and proceeded on foot across a 

 sandy belt of land, with a chain of fresh-water ponds with muddy 

 spaces between them, where the curlew and the whimbrel, the plover 

 and the snipe, found ample feeding-ground, plunging their beaks into 

 the congenial ooze, and the herons, those gloomy monopods, wait in 

 patience the approach of the scaly prey. 



" Nearer the sea long salt-water lagoons and shallow swamps 

 extended, covered in some parts with a white-flowered sea lavender 

 and the blue star of Aster Tripolium. From these the great white heron 

 slowly rose, with bright yellow bill pointing out in front, and long 

 black legs stretched out behind, and after a few lazy flaps with his 

 liuge curved wings, alighted again to resume his interrupted fishing. 

 Equally familiar was his yet larger cousin in gray, the common heron, 

 and, standing on one leg, her loose snowy plumes waving in the 

 breeze, the elegant white egret dreamed of frogs and fishes. Sand- 

 pipers and greenshanks ran piping and probing about the margin, and 

 gulls and little terns screamed, quarrelled and hovered over the heads 

 both of bipeds and birds. As I stooped to collect some specimens of 

 pond-snails in one of the clear fresh-water ponds with a bottom of 

 sandy mud, my attention was arrested by an object which at first sight 

 I regarded as an unknown genus of bivalve MoUusca, but on placing it 

 in a bottle of water the real nature of the creature became revealed. It 

 was an Entomostracon. As a whale among minnows, so, said I, is 

 my new genus among water-fleas; but again I was mistaken. 1 had 

 not fished long before I brought to light a veritable A pus, or shield- 

 shrimp, and 1 saw at once that my supposed new genus was the 

 young of this creature, thus illustrating very prettily the law in the 

 development of organized beings, that the transition state of a higher 

 form will represent the permanent condition of genera lower in the 

 scale of being. I cannot find any account of the metamorphoses of 

 the Apodidaj, or whether it is known that in the young state the shield 

 is folded on itself longitudinally in the form of a bivalve shell which 

 entirely conceals the head, body and feet of the animal. There is but 

 a single large black eye in these young ones, situated Polypheraus- 

 like in the middle of the forehead. The very young larvae are of a 

 pale horn-colour, and swim in a steady manner forwards, the ventral 



