EUPLECTELLA. 
245 
Philippine Islands. They may be found in other parts of the 
Indian Ocean. MM. Quoy and Gaimard’s specimen was pre- 
sented to them by M. Merkus, the governor of the Moluccas and 
said to have been taken up by a sounding. Dr. Arthur Farre’s 
specimen was presented by the king of the Seychelle Islands 
to Captain Etheridge, K.N. and Captain Sir Edward Belcher, 
B.N. brought home a very much crushed specimen obtained 
during his last voyage, but the habitat was not marked ; 
indeed this specimen was picked from among the rejectamenta 
of the collection, and seems to have been unobserved when 
collected. It is to be observed that it is not decidedly stated 
that either MM. Quoy and Graimard’s specimen or Dr. Farre’s 
were obtained in the localities where they were given to their 
respective owners, and they might have been picked up as 
curiosities, and sent from other quarters. 
It would be interesting to discover how they have become so 
common all on a sudden. The Governor of the Moluccas who 
gave the specimen to MM. Quoy and Gaimard and the Governor 
of Manilla, to whom Mr. Cuming showed his specimen, each 
assured those gentlemen that the specimen was exceedingly rare, 
and the two specimens remained almost unique, one orna- 
menting the Paris Museum, and the other the collection of 
M. Cuming for some thirty years, and then they all at once 
became abundant and were sent to market as a regular object 
of trade, most of them having been specially prepared by being 
artificially bleached. 
Many of the specimens have a crab in the base of the tube 
and it is a general belief at Manilla that the case is spun by the 
crab ; that the male and female crab each forms a tube ; and 
therefore they do not consider a single specimen complete 
without it has its fellow. This may be only as a ruse to induce 
persons to purchase a couple of specimens. The specimens with 
a crab in them are valued much higher than those that are 
without it ; thus a Spaniard came from Spain with two speci- 
mens each containing a crab, and valued them at 400£. be- 
cause they had the crabs in them. He was much disgusted when 
I showed him that some of those we had in the museum also 
had crabs, but he could only answer that in his case there were 
a pair, male and female. The crab might easily get into the 
tube before the lid is completed and it would then be caged so 
that it could not escape. But I am informed that the crabs are 
always inserted by the Manilla dealers; that they break the 
specimen partially across just above the root and insert the 
crab, and then bend the root back again. Since I have been 
told this I certainly have observed that all the specimens that 
do contain crabs are cracked near the base. At first it was 
believed that only one kind of crab, an Isopode, was contained 
