7054 MollusJcs — Crustacea. 



marina of the young of Anthea Cereus, which were attached in a semigluiinous state. 

 — William Andrews, Dublin, May 1, 1860. 



A Day among the Cryptochitons. — The gale is over. I land on a warm calm day 

 in the bight of the bay, and the contrast between the clear sunshine and smiling aspect 

 of the green shore and the late raging sea and driving spray is very grateful. The 

 sandpipers are quietly busy probing for worms in the saturated spongy soil ; one very 

 pretty species, with broad webs to his feet, is hovering about the surf chasing flies, and 

 even swimming leisurely about in the water ; the cormorants are dressing their coarse 

 plumage on the rocks; the black-tailed gulls are sporting over the now. tranquil sea; 

 and the inland pond, where the water-fowl used to hide, is twice its original size, so 

 that the rushes no longer conceal the timid wigeon ducks and teal. The little streams 

 are swollen into small torrents ; the shingle is tossed up upon the grassy plain ; the 

 rushes are swept over and torn up by the roots; the outline of the beech is even 

 altered, and, to show the force of the wind and the violence of the sea, thousands of 

 large mussels in bunches and clusters have been wrenched from their anchorage on 

 the rocks, and thrown up high and dry upon the strand. Crossing a narrow pro- 

 montory, I descend the cliflfs on the other side and reach the seaward shore. I find 

 myself in a small bay, — high, jagged limestone pinnacles and huge vertical-seamed 

 cliffs hedging me in and bounding the view on either side, and in front the open 

 treacherous main. The first objects I notice are prodigious masses of tangle, or 

 Laminaria, thrown up in heaps, and hundreds of the large tuuicaled curious Crypto- 

 chiton Stelleri, detached by the gale from the off-lying submerged rocks, and cast, like 

 shipwrecked sailors, on the shore ; dashed against the cliffs and ground by rolling 

 boulders, their internal valves are mostly crushed, and here and there their mangled 

 bodies are found, having been carried to the tops of rounded stones, and their bones 

 picked clean by sea-birds. I walk, solitary and musing, up and down the bay, 

 throwing mutilated Chitons by dozens into the sea, and am rewarded now and then 

 by finding one tolerably perfect. Several specimens of the large Octopus — possibly 

 the rather apochryphal O. chinensis — are cast ashore, and afford me an opportunity of 

 securing the horny mandibles, the rudimentary skull, and some of the suckers from 

 the arms. One I measure is six feet from the tip of one arm to the tip of the opposite 

 arm. The large eyes are covered with the skin, with the exception of a very small 

 round aperture; the body is black-brown and minutely granular. Large skate, rock- 

 cod and other fish have shared the untimely fate of the cuttles, and are lying dead 

 and bruised among the stones, and fragments of the giant Lilhodes (like the one I 

 lately sent to the British Museum) strew the narrow strips of sand. It was an 

 impressive scene, and remains indelibly stamped upon my memory. — Arthur Adams ; 

 St. Vladimir Bay, Manchuria, September 12, 1859. 



Crustacea casting off their Legs. —Is there any reason known for the habit that 

 hermit crabs so frequently indulge in of casting away their limbs ? It is a popular 

 belief among fishermen that lobsters throw off their claws from the fright occasioned 

 by a thunderstorm or the firing of heavy guns, but the hermit crabs part with their 

 members without any apparent cause of alarm, and sometimes continue to do so for 



