LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. II 
ing with creatures almost as simple as the coral- 
builders, takes quite a different line, having for its 
members mussels and snails, cuttle-fish and oysters, 
and dividing into two curious groups : the one of 
the shell-fish with heads, and the other of those 
without any. 
The fifth division, starting also in its own line by 
the side of the third and fourth, includes the creeping 
worms provided with quite a different set of weapons, 
and working in their own peculiar fashion, some living 
in the water, some on the earth, and some in the flesh 
of other beings, feeding upon their living tissues. An 
ugly division this, and yet when we come to study it 
we shall find it full of curious forms showing strange 
habits and ways. 
The sixth division is a vast army in itself, with 
four chief groups all agreeing in their members 
having jointed feet, and subdivided into smaller 
groups almost without number. The first group, 
including the crabs and their companions, live in the 
water, and their weapons are so varied and numerous 
that it will be difficult for us even to gain some 
general idea of them. The other three groups, the 
centipedes, spiders, and six -legged insects, breathe 
only in the air. This sixth or jointed-legged division 
contains more than four- fifths of the whole of the 
living beings on our globe, and it forms a world 
of its own, full of interest and wonders. In it we 
have all the strange facts of metamorphosis, the 
wondrous contrivances and constructions of insect- 
life, and at the head of it those clever societies of 
wasps, bees, and ants, with laws sometimes even 
nearer to perfection than those of man himself. 
Lastly we come to the seventh and vast division 
2 
