CRUSTACEANS 
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a period the most 
stirring and the most fruitful for natural history that the world has ever 
known. To promote the study of it clubs, societies, associations either 
sprang up afresh or were quickened into renewed and more vigorous 
activity over a wide area. A persistent and varied industry was thus 
excited, the results of which, after being orally explained and discussed 
within a small circle, were afterwards in many cases with more or less com- 
pleteness printed and published. Though no doubt this was often done 
only to gratify an author or a little coterie of friends, the unintended con- 
sequences were not unimportant. The collected reports were frequently 
to a high degree miscellaneous. There was little editorial sifting of 
wheat from chaff. The circulation was usually very limited. Hence 
it has come to pass that on science is laid a twofold burden ; first the 
task of searching for publications often far from easy to meet with, and 
then the task of discovering whether there are any useful facts or 
opinions to be gleaned from them on any particular theme out of the 
wilderness of all possible themes which they are capable of embracing. 
The Abstract of Proceedings and Transactions of the Bedfordshire Natural 
History Society and Field Club, beginning with the year 1876, is very 
much a case in point. A perusal of these records at the library of the 
National Museum in Cromwell Road is a pleasant enough study in itself, 
but in regard to the crustaceans of the county the information to be 
derived from it is scanty in the extreme. In a way the carcinologist is 
debarred from complaining, seeing that a far more popular subject is 
exposed to equal neglect. For Mr. W. B. Graham exclaims in this 
very abstract : ‘ Multitudinous, however, as the insect fauna of Bedford- 
shire unquestionably is, yet in the entomological world the county is 
almost wholly ignored.’* In words to precisely the same effect it may 
be declared that, multitudinous as the crustacean fauna of Bedfordshire 
unquestionably is, yet in the carcinological world the county is almost 
wholly ignored. 
Of the higher Malacostraca only one species is here to be expected, 
and that by good hap satisfies expectation, since Mr. James Saunders, 
A.L.S., writing from Luton, January 19, 1902, kindly informs me that 
‘crayfish are abundant in the river Lea south of Luton Hoo.’ This 
lobster-like macruran, Potamobius pallipes (Lereboullet), the river cray- 
fish, should certainly not be neglected. Professor Huxley, taking its 
1 Abs. Proc. Trans. Beds Nat. Hist. Soc. and Field Club for the year 1876-7 (Jan. 1, 1878), p. 127. 
® Lysons, Magna Britannia (1806), i. 21, mentions it ‘among the fish of the Ouse,’ 
gI 
