96 METAMORPHOSES OF MAN 



few hours on the sea-shore during low- water ? If so 

 he must have observed the little Portunus moenas, 

 " le crabe enrage/' as our sailors call it, which of all 

 its tribe leaves its native element the most willingly, 

 and being little sought after, on account of the insipid 

 character of its flesh, brings forth its young in the 

 very neighbourhood of the fishermen's cottages. In 

 its earlier days, and before it assumed this amphibious 

 sort of life, it swam about in the open sea under the 

 form of a Zoe.* Its head was then indistinct from 

 the thorax, both being covered by a sort of globular 

 carapace, from which long processes projected ante- 

 riorly, posteriorly, and laterally; its long abdomen 

 terminated in a wide deeply bifurcated extremity; its 

 mouth was of the simplest form; its limbs, which in 

 the adult are complex, and are partly employed in 

 mastication, were represented by four long double 

 oar-like filaments, and its true feet were entirely 

 rudimentary. In fact there was not a single feature 

 to remind one of the flattened greenish crab, which 

 is so regardless of the observer that it hardly troubles 

 itself to run away from him, and which seems in its 

 jerking sidelong gait to imitate the little impish boys 

 of the streets of Paris. 



* The larvae of certain Crustacea had been named and classified as 

 distinct species, until Thompson, and afterwards Captain Ducasse, 

 described the strange metamorphoses which these animals undergo. 

 — (" Zoological Eesearches and Illustrations," 1831 ; " On the double 

 Metamorphosis in the decapodous Crustacea," 1835. — Philosophical 

 Transactions.) In the Zoe group were ranged the larvae of Brachyura 

 and of some others, which the discoveries of the English naturalists 

 have done away with. Facts of this sort are abundant enough now- 

 adays ; and it has been recently shown by Messrs. Coste and Gerbe, 

 that the Phyllosomidse are only the larvas of the lobster. 



