836 Crustacea. 



this process occurs need not be enlarged on here, as it will be fully 

 described in the forthcoming work of Professor Bell, on British Crus- 

 tacea. But it may be mentioned as varying in different species : in 

 the craw-fish, the first ring of the abdomen is disjoined from the 

 carapace, as Mr. Chirgwin notices, and through this opening the 

 animal escapes. In the crab the same disunion occurs, and the 

 curved sutures on the anterior and inferior edge also become sepa- 

 rated, while in the lobster the separation extends along the furrow on 

 the back of the carapace, from the frontal point to where it joins the 

 abdomen. The process of exuviation in the cases mentioned above 

 was probably hastened by the position in which the creatures were 

 held ; but though more slowly, it is effected no less surely by the 

 creatures in a state of nature. — E. Q. Couch; Chapel-street, Pen- 

 zance, December 19, 1844.] 



Notice of British Crustacea.* 



The ' Metamorphosis of Crustacea,' and the ' Nidification of 

 Fishes,' are discoveries that will mark the present Natural- History 

 era through ages yet to come. Both these phenomena have been 

 doubted, and very excusably, by those whose opportunities of obser- 

 vation are restricted to their books ; but in both instances, fact 

 has so crowded upon fact, that the arguments and assertions of the 

 incredulous are lost in the light of truth ; and to subtle dissertations, 

 showing that " such things cannot be," is found the incontrover- 

 tible answer — "such things are!" The naturalists of the pre- 

 sent day are becoming more and more men of enquiry ; men who see 

 the advantage of personal observation ; men who take but little for 

 granted ; men, in fine, who are unostentatiously but unerringly work- 

 ing out the real history, or as a popular writer has it, the "private 

 lives" of animals. A few there are — and those mostly young and 

 inexperienced — still wasting their time with idle technicalities and 

 toilsome endeavours to extract fame from desultory descriptions of 

 supposed novelties, or wearisome dissertations on errors which are 

 thus for a moment — and only a moment — raised from merited obli- 

 vion : but such writers are becoming rare ; are, in fact, merging into 

 manhood, and its concomitant characteristics. 



* A History of British Crustacea, by Thomas Boll, F.R.S., &c. &c. London: 

 Van Voorst. (Sob. 1 and 2 published.) 



