of the sun, till that luminary falls into the
lap of autumn, and all his short-comings
—very many in this country, though fewer
this year than usual — are weighed in the
Balance. It is not an ordinary animal that
could do all this.

But to re-translate our crab from the skies,
and bring him back to earth. Observe
of what account he is. There is not a part
of the globe of which he is not an esteemed
inhabitant. Attempt the north-west passage,
and under the name of homola spinifrous,
all covered with yellow hairs, like the dwarf
in the fairy tale, you meet him in the Arctic
regions. Bathe in the Indian seas, and you
shall encounter him as Egeria — " the nympholepsy
of some fond despair" — armed with
long slender claws, and clambering over the
rocks where you have left your clothes. Cast
your line in the depths of ocean, and if your
hook be baited with the savoury meat which
his soul loveth — " radiated animals, and fish
of all kinds," peradventure you shall capture
him, now calling himself gonoplax rhomboides
—a hard, angular name, befitting a sharp,
active, industrious individual who has his
own living to get, and gets it at the expense
of somebody else. There are great varieties
of the crab family in the Mediterranean:
one of the most notable of them is the
calappa granulata, a species which the
Marseilles fishermen have loaded with all sorts of
opprobrious and ridiculous names, calling
them migranes, coqs de mer, and crabes
honteux, though what they have to be
ashamed of is more than I can tell. Modest
crabs would be the more appropriate term,
for they hide themselves in the clefts of the
rocks at a depth of nearly a hundred feet.
It is the difficulty of getting at them, I
suspect, which makes the Marseillais so spiteful.
They are quite worth the trouble of catching,
though not easy to get at when caught; for
they are about the best protected crabs going,
their chelae and all their other feet being shut
in like instruments of Sheffield make. There
is the dorippe again, a well-known decapod
haunting the shores of the Adriatic. The
inhabitants of Rimini, that pontifical city,
shamefully abuse this crab, calling him
facchino (blackguard); like Ancient Pistol,
" they eat and eke they swear." But the
good folks of Rimini ought to have remembered
the proverb about throwing stones:
the most illustrious family of which their place
can boast bearing the sobriquet — given them,
perhaps, by the crabs — of Malatesta (wrong-head).
There is much ingenuity in the way
the dorippe bestows his legs: two pairs of
them being placed on his back, so that if
accident or malevolence — on the part of the
people of Rimini — turn him upside down,
he can get over the ground quite as
well as if nobody had disturbed him. It is a
great mistake to suppose that all crabs are
awkward. There is, it is true, a Welshman
who, in perfect accordance with Cambrian
ideas of dignity, styles himself corytes
cassivelaunus, and is a very stiff-limbed,
long-clawed crustacean: he is awkward enough in
all conscience, — his wooden-looking, dollified
pincers, tripping him up at every step — and
probably making him swear, for his temper,
of course, is hot — as he scrambles over the
sands at Beaumaris, where he chiefly delights
to dwell. But, on the other hand, see how
active and sprightly are many of the
brachyurous race. There are the grapsoidians,
the most timorous of crabs, that run with
incredible swiftness. Who has not noticed their
wonderful activity when disturbed on the
rocks at Ramsgate? They may be, as Mr. Milne
Edwards says, very grotesque in their
movements, but at all events they are uncommonly
spry. Run after and try to catch one, and then
see where you are. In all probability sprawling
on your face amid the sea-weed. The scientific
name for these dodgers is carcinus moenas,
the common shore crab, a designation which,
when spoken in English, must be carefully
pronounced for fear of accident, though crabs
themselves are not very particular as to the
haunts which they frequent. The carcinus
moenas has one peculiarity which I must
mention. Unlike the generality of decapods,
they are born with tails; but those they
leave behind 'em as they grow older. In
Norway this species is called the garnater or
duck-crab; and Pontoppidan, who has a
large, episcopal faith, says that their greatest
danger arises from the eel, " which twines
itself about the creature's claws, and by
squeezing itself together (boa-constrictor
fashion), breaks them off and sucks them with
great eagerness." The gourmand! Spite of
his faith, however, the good Bishop of Bergen
does not believe, with Pliny or Ovid, that
these crabs are at a certain season transformed
into scorpions. He says it is not at all
probable. If you wish to know what Ovid says
on the subject, I refer you to the fifteenth
book of his Metamorphoses, or to the
translation made, in sixteen hundred and three, by
Arthur Golding, gentleman, who, in rather
long-legged verse, thus gives the recipe for
making a scorpion:

Go pull away the cleas from crabbes that in the sea
         do breede,
And burye all the rest in mould, and of the same will
         spring
A scorpion which with writhea tayle will threaten for
         to sting.

Gesner, in rough German, says the like.

There is a kind of crab which I think the
eels aforesaid would fight shy of: this is the
Trold-krabber, or prickly crab, sometimes
called the Sea-spider, whose embraces might
not be so pleasant as those of a smoother
sort. These Trolds, like their preternatural
namesakes the Dwarfs, have the faculty of
prognosticating a sudden change of weather,
by rapidly changing colours, A blushing
crab must be an example to animals!
But before I have done with the