290 
SUPPLEMENT 
that the crabs, craw-fish, cericse, the paguri, the lizards, and 
even serpents, descend every year to the sea for the purpose 
of bathing, of changing skin, or shell, that the tourlourous, 
crabs and ceriques, have also the object of depositing their 
eggs there. He equally gives the name of tourlourou to the 
Crustacea which we have already mentioned, and which are 
exclusively found at the point of Barbary. The habit of de- 
vouring their disabled comrades, he sapiently conceives to be 
the cause of the maleficent qualities which they possess He 
is much more exact and judicious in his remarks on the sexual 
and external differences of the touroulous and crabs: these he 
establishes on the proportions and form of the tail. 
The white crabs are the most bulky of all. Some have 
been seen, one of whose pincers could contain a man’s fist. 
They remain at the foot of trees, and in lone and marshy situa- 
tions near the sea shore ; they make holes in the earth, and 
retire thither, as the rabbits do, into their burrows, seldom ap- 
pearing during the day. On searching in the sand to dis- 
cover them, it is found that they always have one half of their 
body in the water. They are hunted principally in the night, 
the people carrying flambeaux of caudle-wood in their hands; 
and as they do not remove to any distance from their retreats, 
and even withdraw into the first hole which they can find, 
they must be seized the moment they are perceived. 
Labat has observed of the white crabs, that the necessity 
of changing air, and the fear of being covered by the waves of 
the sea, oblige them sometimes to issue forth by daylight from 
their retreats. The holes which they inhabit are then marked, 
and a stick is, on their return, passed into them, which retains 
the animals captive. When the tide has flowed, the stick is 
removed, and the crab is then found smothered at the edge of 
the hole. The negroes unite their claws, fixing them one in 
another, then string these Crustacea by means of the ring thus 
formed, and thus carry them to market. 
