Reviews—Stebbing’s Crustacea. O29 
I have preferred to leave over this last section of the Malacostraca 
hoping to engage the reader’s interest in it at no distant future.” 
We earnestly trust this aspiration may speedily be realized, for it 
may not be known to all who take up Mr. Stebbing’s volume, that 
this group—which Jonah-like, he has had to cast overboard at the 
last moment, at the command of an inexorable publisher, and a 
procrustean (International) rule as to size!—is the particular section 
of the Crustacea upon which the author himself has expended 
almost a life’s work, and with a monograph on which he has 
filled three large volumes of the “‘ Challenger Reports,” covering 1774 
pages of text 4to. and 212 4to. plates; a task which has occupied 
him almost exclusively for six years, and the figures for which, 
like those of the present little work, were all drawn with his own 
hands ! 
Seeing this is so, and that the Hntomostraca, the Merostomata, the 
Trilobita, and the Anchoracephala or Cirripedia also remain to be 
described, it is not too much to hope, that the publishers should 
speedily give us another companion volume to complete the history 
of this important group. 
The Crabs, Brachyura, or ‘“Short-tails,” represent the highest 
development of the Crustacean type existing at the present day ; 
that is to say, if we regard what Dana calls “cephalization,” or the 
concentration of nerves and locomotory organs around a common 
centre, as the height of perfection in this class. 
Crabs with short-tails date back in geological time to the Great 
Oolite (Prosopon mammillatum and Paleinachus longipes, H. Woodw., 
being the oldest known forms). They are frequently met with 
fossil from the Upper Secondary to the present day, when they 
attain their maximum within the warmer latitudes, being represented 
by land, freshwater and marine forms in great variety and abundance. 
Mr. Stebbing devotes about 100 pages to this first section and gives 
us pictures of some of the more interesting forms. 
The author places the Anomonra or Anomala (Hermit Crabs, ete.) 
at the commencement of the Macroura (Lobsters), but as has been 
pointed out by Dr. Woodward (Encyclop. Brit. 1877, 9th edition, 
vol. vi. p. 656), some Anomoura appear to belong to the Brachyura, 
or short-tailed division (Crabs), as Lithodes, Porcellana, Dromia, 
Dorippe, ete.—whilst others, as Galathea, Munida, Paguri, and Birgus 
favour the long-tailed Macroura (Lobsters). Obviously then the 
Anomala belong to both Brachyurous and Macrourous types, from 
which they diverge by reason of some method of concealment 
which they have adopted, and which has modified the usual and 
normal structures of the class to which they belong, just as the 
Cizripedia (in their adult sedentary state) and the numerous parasitic 
Isopods, Copepods, and Rhizocephala, are modified until all trace 
of their Crustacean lineaments is lost. As might reasonably be 
expected, the Macroura, being less highly specialized than the 
Brachyura, date back much earlier in time, numerous forms referable 
to the genus Anthrapalemon having been described by Salter, . 
Woodward, Htheridge, and Peach, from the English and Scottish 
