66 FISHERIES OF THE ORIENTAL REGION, 



as to leave their recognition a matter of no difficulty. The letter- 

 press gives a Latin name as well as the appellations by which most 

 of the species are known in Malay, the local dialect, and Dutch. 

 Many of the references of Linnaeus are to these figures, and thus 

 they serve to fix the names of the species. There appears to have 

 been little change in the Malay nomenclature during the last 180 

 years. 



Perhaps it may be well to remind readers that the class 

 Crustacea is divided into four large sub-classes, and these again 

 into fourteen or fifteen large orders. The sub-class Malacostraca 

 is the one that contains all those singular beings which we dis- 

 tinguish by the names of crabs, lobsters, crayfishes, prawns, shrimps, 

 squillae, hermit-crabs, &c. Outside this sub-class there is only one 

 species which need occupy our attention, which is in the small 

 sub-class Merostomata, so-called because the upper ends of their 

 legs are furnished with masticating jaws. There are only two 

 orders in the Merostomata, one of which is extinct, and the other 

 called Xiphosura, because the tail is long and sharp like a sword. 

 The animals which form this order are the king-crabs. 



Every one familiar with books of natural history must have 

 seen a representation of the strange animal known as the Limulus 

 or king-crab. It is one of those strange organisms which come 

 like spectres from the domain of palaeontology suggesting, by the 

 odd combination of claws, nippers, spike and shield, an offensive 

 thing, with all the noisomeness of the spider and the venom of a 

 scorpion. Hugh Miller has made a Romance of Geology out of 

 such beings from the Old Red Sandstone. We don't expect to 

 see them living now-a-days, but this one has strayed to us from 

 remote palaeozoic times. It is a survivor that claims relationship 

 with forms belonging to the very morning of animal life. Its 

 structure gives hints of trilobites, and it is an important connecting 

 link with such strange creatures as Hemiaspis of the Upper 

 Silurian. There is evidence that at one time there were many 

 other orders, and that Merostomata was a sub-class which 

 played an important part in the muddy waters of early palaeozoic 



