426 
PLINT'S natural HISTOIIT. 
[Book IX, 
double, in the male single ; besides which, the animal has two 
claws with indented pincers. The upper part only of these 
fore-feet is moveable, the lower being immoveable : the right 
claw is the largest in them all.''^^ Sometimes they assemble 
together in large bodies i''^ but as they are unable to cross the 
mouth of the Euxine, they turn back again and go round by 
land, and the road by which they travel is to be seen all beaten 
down with their foot-marks. 
The smallest crab of any is that known as the pinnotheres,^^ 
and hence it is peculiarly exposed to danger ; its shrewdness, 
however, is evinced by its concealing itself in the shell of the 
oyster ; and as it grows larger, it removes to those of a larger 
size. 
Crabs, when alarmed, go backwards as swiftly as when 
moving forwards. They fight with one another like rams, 
butting at each other with their horns. They have^^ a mode of 
curing themselves of the bites of serpents. It is said,^^ that 
from the female, except in the opercule. There seems, in reality, to be 
no foundation for the statement here made by Pliny. 
"^^ Both in the crab and the cray-fish, Aristotle says. 
''^ ^lian, Hist. Anim. B. vii. c. 24, calls this kind of crab dponiacy 
the runner," from the great distance it is known to travel. He says, 
that they meet together, coming in one by one, at a certain bay in the 
Thracian Bosporus, where those who have arrived wait for the others ; and 
that on finding that the waves of the Euxine are sufficiently violent to 
sweep them away, they unite in a dense body, and then waiting till the 
waters have retired, make a passage across the straits. 
Cuvier remarks, that Hardouin is correct in considering this the same 
as the crab known in France as Bernard the Hermit (our hermit-crab), tlie 
Cancer Bernardus of Linnaeus, a species of the genus now known as the 
Pagur. This animal hides its tail and lower extremities in the empty shells 
of whelks, or other univalves. Cuvier suggests that bur author committed 
a slip of the pen, in using the word oyster here for shell-fish. This is the 
KapKiviovj probably, of Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. v. c. 15, and De Part. 
Anim. B. iv. c. 8 ; and it is most prohable that, as Cuvier states, the real 
TTivvorrjpTjg of Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. iv. c. 4, and B. v. c. 14, was 
another of the Crustacea, of which Pliny speaks under the same name in 
0. 66. This last is a small crab, that lives in the shells of bivalves, such 
as mussels, &c., but not Avhen empty. See the Notes to c, 66. 
This circumstance is more fully treated of in B. xxxii. c. 19. 
81 Our author speaks rather more guardedly here than usual ; and Har- 
douin seems almost inclined to believe the story. Ovid also alludes to this 
story in the Met. B. xv. 1. 370, et seq, " If you take off the bending claws 
from the crab of the sea-shore, and bury the rest in the earth, a scorpion 
will come forth from the part so buried, and will threaten with its crooked 
tail." 
