78 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



CRABS AND THEIR WAYS. 



1. With one's eyes kept open, how very much there is 

 to excite interest in a summer stroll beside the sea ! Ma- 

 rino life — the creatures that represent the life-zone that 

 belts or fringes the great murmuring world of waters — is so 

 peculiar, some exquisitely beautiful, as the sea-anemones, 

 others droll and grotesque, as the great class known as the 

 Crustacea. The tide is out. See that bird with bill curv- 

 ing upward. A beautiful functional adaptation it is — for 

 with it small stones are turned over so deftly, and thus its 

 food, the sheltered worms, are cxpiosed. It is the avocet. 



2. So we turn avocet, using a stick in the operation. 

 Ah ! we have disturbed a poor polydactyled refugee in his 

 retreat. See how threateningly he snaps at us his two 

 pairs of pincers like formidable blacksmith-tongs. What a 

 crustj'-looking fellow he is ! Now lie is off, running side- 

 wise ; for they can go ''forward, backward, and oblique." 

 There is speed enough, but the gait is so comical. But 

 crabs are given to flank movements. We determine to try 

 one on him ; so with the stick just touching him laterally, 

 and a fillip, and he is on his back. 



3. At this point, Frank, who is always facetious, and 

 who had just been saying that he had come from the bowl- 

 ing green (he meant alley), says we have knocked the poor 

 fellow off his pins, and that it was a ten-strike, adding for 

 our enlightenment, " Don't you see that crab stands on ten 

 pins ? " Now, it so happens in this connection that it is 

 just on this "ten-pin" arrangement that the naturalist 

 founds his division Decapoda as one of the three orders of 

 the great class Crustacea. The decapods, or ten-footed, 

 include the crabs and lobsters, and rank the highest in 

 their class. 



4. AH crustaceans exuviate, or cast their hard, shelly 



