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CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE NATURAL 

 HISTORY OF THE LOBSTER AND CRAB. 



By J. T. CUNNINGHAM, M.A., Oxon, I^ecturer on Fishery Subjects under 

 the Technical Instruction Committee of the Cornwall County Council. 



I. — The Lobster. 



The breeding of the Lobster, both the European and American 

 species, has been much studied and investigated in recent years. 

 It has been proved that the eggs are produced in summer and 

 autumn, are carried, attached to the abdominal appendages, for 

 about 9 or I o months, and then hatched in the summer of the 

 following year. The investigations have been made chiefly by an 

 indirect method. The sequence of events has not been usually 

 followed in particular specimens, but the condition of lobsters taken 

 at various times, in all months of the year, has been carefully 

 noted, and the necessary conclusions have been obtained. The 

 direct method of study offers various difficulties. The animals 

 must be kept in confinement, in order that they may be identified, 

 and when so kept, they are generally under more or less unnatural 

 or novel conditions which may affect their health, or may produce 

 some change in the processes and habits of spawning, so that the 

 normal and natural succession of phases remains still uncertain. 

 Experience has, however, shown that the result of confinement is 

 usually to suppress the reproductive processes, or to prevent their 

 complete accomplishment, and not to hasten them or produce 

 increased fertility, and also that the injurious influence of confine- 

 ment is less in proportion as the conditions under which the animals 

 are kept, approximate to the natural state in which they live when 

 free. 



The naturalists who have studied the lobster have all come to 

 the conclusion that the female does not generally, after hatching a 

 brood of eggs, produce another brood in the same year, but that 

 there is at least a year's interval between the hatching of one brood 

 and the laying of the next. The chief reason for this conclusion, 

 and a very important one, is that in the winter months a large 

 proportion of the females captured are not carrying eggs. A female. 



