20 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
have the death of the mollusk distinctly contemplated, in 
anticipation, no doubt, of the Fall of Man, which would react 
upon the lower animals, shorten the span of existence for the 
Turritella and the Whelk, and so at length accommodate the 
shivering Crustacean with a house and a holdfast for its tail. 
But this, it seems, was likely to make the Hermit too comfort- 
able ; so another special creation presents itself in the shape of 
certain Rhizocephala, which have a free existence of a few days, 
and then attach themselves to the Hermit’s abdomen. In this 
attachment, by Fritz Muller’s account, these objects of dis- 
tinct creation “ remain astomatous ( i.e . without mouths) ; they 
lose all their limbs completely, and appear as sausage-like, 
sack-shaped, or discoidal excrescences of their host.” Closed 
tubes, ramified like roots, sink into his interior, twist round his 
intestine, or become diffused among the sac-like tubes of his 
liver. But distinct creation has not yet done with the Hermit 
and his guest ; for in the case of Sacculina purpurea the roots 
of the parasite are made use of by two other parasites, which 
take up their abode beneath the Sacculina , and cause it to die 
away by intercepting the nourishment conveyed by the roots ; 
and when the Sacculina itself is dead its roots continue to 
flourish and abound, at the expense of the Hermit and for the 
benefit of the besieging Bopyrus. 
The distinct creation of this series of animals — of a crab not 
fitted like other crabs to produce a shell of its own, but adapted 
only to occupy the shell of a dead mollusk ; of a Sacculina , not 
furnished like most animals with a mouth and limbs, but with 
roots suited only to steal away the vitality of the crab ; and 
lastly of a Bopyrus , not designed for independent existence, 
but contrived to depend for its life upon the destruction of all 
but the roots of the Sacculina — seems to me as unlike our 
ordinary notions of wisdom and benevolence, as contrary to all 
analogy of human art and contrivance, as anything that could 
easily be conceived. Would any man in his senses raise a 
building specially suited to one set of machinery, and at the 
same time specially contrive a different set of machinery to 
suit that style of building ; and at the same time devise a third 
set of engines which could not work apart from the previous 
set, nor yet work with that set except by stealing away its 
products ; and at the same time invent a fourth set to rob the 
third set of what it stole from the second ? From such a group 
of designs we should infer either that there had been several 
designs hostile in purpose, or, if on other grounds we were 
sure that one wise master -artist was the author of them all, we 
should feel equally assured that the working out of these 
designs had not been contemporaneous but a gradual process, 
worked out in correspondence with gradually varying circum- 
