morals, they are (as they always were) things indifferent to me. I think, though contrary to the common way of thinking; I wrong no man by this, and hope it is not offensive to that eternal Being that formed me and the world; and as by this I injure no man, no man can be reasonably offended. I solicitously recommend myself to that eternal and almighty Being, the God of nature, if I have done amiss. But perhaps I have not, and I hope this thing will never be imputed to me. Though I am now stained by malevolence and suffer by prejudice, I hope to rise fair and unblemished. My life was not polluted, my morals irreproachable, and my opinions orthodox.' I slept sound till three o'clock, awaked, and then writ these lines: Come, pleasing rest, eternal slumbers fall, Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all; Adieu! fair friends, and all that's good and wise. Are these lines the dignified farewell of a martyred philosopher, or the egotistical exit of a criminal posing as martyr and philosopher? Would not a word or two of greeting and apology to Clarke and Mrs. Aram have been more seemly and polite on such an occasion than six of the worst lines ever penned-even in the eighteenth century-in praise of his own sublime departure from this world? Over Aram's farewell, one can exclaim with Joseph Surface, 'Ah, my dear sir, 'tis this very conscious innocence that is of the greatest prejudice to you.' One would be so grateful for just some little acknowledgment of human weakness from this consciously irreproachable assassin. Was Eugene Aram a well-intentioned man? That would be the most instructive question to resolve. We are inclined to answer it in the negative; but it is difficult to give a decided verdict on such an issue in the presence of merely oral testimony. All we can say with absolute certainty is that he murdered Daniel Clarke and discovered a European affinity in Celtic roots. For the latter achievement he is entitled to rank with scholars as well as murderers; for the former he was hanged at York, half fainting from his attempt at suicide which had been happily, or unhappily, frustrated, and his body hung in chains near Knaresborough. One of his daughters, Betty, described as a 'wild girl,' saw the corpse swinging in its chains on Thistle Hill and gleefully ran to tell her mother that she had seen father hanging up on the hill; the sight seemed to give her satisfaction. Houseman withdrew with his raven from his native village, loathed and dejected, his windows smashed by old pupils of Aram's, and died in his bed at a place called Marton. Mrs. Aram kept a pie and sausage shop in Knaresborough, and picked up her husband's bones as they fell from the gibbet. H. B. IRVING. 1 I should think it was very doubtful whether a prison chaplain would assent to Aram's claim to orthodoxy. There is a suspicious flavour of eighteenth-century deism in his conception of God. However, the God of the Bible and the God of the philosopher are equally odious on the lips of murderers, repentant or unrepentant. CURIOSITIES ABOUT CRUSTACEA THE astounding ignorance of the man! Such were the words of Samuel Wilberforce on hearing that Pope Pius the Ninth had supposed him to be a mere professor, instead of a bishop-simulated indignation meet for a pardonable mistake. Far other vials of wrath should be out-poured on the worse than papal blindness with which the carcinologist is continually affronted. In their astounding ignorance many, who fancy themselves well educated, have never even heard the name, let alone knowing what it means. That editor, therefore, deserves well of his country and his time, who opens his columns to the much-needed and impressive explanation that a carcinologist is a student of crustacea. To have won this single forward step in public education is something of value. But there are still deplorable depths of darkness to be dealt with. In unhappy contrast with the boasted enlightenment of the nineteeth century,' there is the painful fact that persons in the upper and middle classes of society frequently confound crustacea with the molluscs which they are pleased to speak of as shell-fish, not so much from the old notion that whatever comes out of the sea must be in a manner fishy, as from the more modern one that whatever is sold by the fishmonger may decently be regarded as fish. People advanced in life and in respectable circumstances will confess, quite unabashed, and as though it were nothing to be ashamed of, to having always thought that there was only one kind of shrimp and only one kind of woodlouse. Could anything be more afflicting? Not seldom they confound in their muddled ideas the crayfish of the river with the crawfish of the ocean, or, on the other hand, suppose that a crawfish is a lobster, or again are miserably deluded into confusing the 'Norway Lobster,' elegant in shape and hue, with the common lobster, just because myriads of the latter come to our markets from Norway. One thing indeed is generally known, and of this piece of knowledge the modern world is excessively proud, as though it were a recent discovery, that the portrait of a live lobster ought not to be coloured red. There is also a vague impression that the marine painter was wrong when he attached the claws of the great eatable crab behind the rest of its legs instead of in front of them. How safely, without fear of fault finding on the part of the public, might he have introduced into his picture a Spiny Lobster' wearing claws, though it has none, and a common lobster with only one pair of them, though in fact it has three. It is true that the second and third pairs are small, but they are quite distinct and easy to perceive. Really, if the general reader and ordinary seeker after knowledge would bring his powerful mind to bear on the subject, he would find that there is in the study of crustacea as much variety of interest, as much facile amusement and as much perplexing difficulty, as much opportunity for observation and experiment, as much incitement to hunting and collecting, and exploring the recesses of land and sea, as there is in any other fashionable province of exertion. To be more explicit, it can compete on favourable terms with circle-squaring, butterfly-catching, the ascent of lofty mountains, the search for the North Pole, the tabulation of authentic ghosts, the viewing of nebulæ, the counting of asteroids, and the prospecting of stars so distant that we cannot tell whether they are still in existence. Novel-reading and money-making are omitted from this list of examples, lest the objection should be raised that these are necessaries of life, while the study of crustaceans is only a luxury. It is difficult in brief space to give any adequate idea of the extent of the subject. A few species are familiar on the table. These are agreeable to the eye, because the expectant palate pronounces in their favour. They have absorbed an unfair amount of attention. Hence it is little understood that crustaceans have an importance in the food-supply of the globe far beyond that which belongs to them as gratifying the appetite of mankind. The species of them are to be counted by thousands. Their dwelling-places are extremely varied. Their manners and customs are often not a little remarkable. Their diversity of form is such that in this direction it might well be said, The force of Nature could no further go.' First among the proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied out, stands that which says, 'It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.' The proverb speaks as though there were sometimes a direct intention in Nature to puzzle and mystify the student, to put him on his mettle in dealing with the intricacy of the problems. There is the playfulness of a riddle propounded, the seriousness of an education designed. Nowhere are these appearances more obtrusive than in the class of crustacea. Only by slow steps have naturalists come to know its proper boundaries, which still at one or two points are subjects of dispute and civil war. As for the poor unhappy people who are not naturalists, it is often difficult to persuade them that a woodlouse is as much a crustacean as a crab. Little do they think that here also belong shorehoppers and barnacles, as well as hosts of creatures opprobriously misnamed water-fleas and fish-lice. It must in truth allowed that, while some members of the class are large and striking, gallantly armed, brilliantly coloured, and altogether very finely endowed, there are others in many respects much the reverse. These latter, for the sake of a safe, a quiet, and an easy life, have assumed such disguises, or renounced so many characteristic features, that comfort with content rather than peace with honour has fallen to their lot. Ignoble, misshapen, and obscure, lives the parasite; retrograde, degraded, and spiritless, but far from being an outcast. On the other hand, among the free-living species there are many which, without combining every excellence, are severally conspicuous for at least one. Thus, some are in size minute but resplendent in colouring, some without brilliance are strongly armoured, some feeble in accoutrement are fleet of foot or nimble-witted. Some can build themselves houses. Some can dig and delve. Some that seem in every way defenceless still keep their place in Nature by an almost incredible fecundity. It is likely that a great whale eats as many crustaceans as a great city, and yet the little animals known as whale food' are in far less danger of becoming extinct than the monster which devours them. 6 Quite at the head of society in the class of crustacea stand the crabs. Among these the differences of form are extremely numerous, demanding the epithets round, oval, square, oblong, triangular, smooth, spiky, tuberculous, flat, globular, lumpy, nugget-like, and others. The shape is chiefly determined by the carapace, that part of the integument which in our eatable crab not only looks like a pie-dish, but is often used like one. Though exposed to this ignominy after death, in the animal's lifetime the carapace covers and protects its vital organs, the gills, the heart, the stomach and intestine, and that concentrated nervous system by which the crab is ennobled above its fellows. In no small degree, however, is the general facies of a crab affected also by the many differences in pattern of the legs. These are in some cases inordinately long and spiderlike, in others short and compact. The tips may be narrow and pointed, or flattened out into oar-blades. Especially the claw-bearing pair in front are characteristic by their massiveness or elongation or want of symmetry, or by some quaintness of outline, as the likeness to a cock's comb, or again by being small, and short, and smooth, and comparatively symmetrical. As for the squares and circles of the carapace, these are diversified by all sorts of projections and indentures, while the triangles may be equilateral, obtuse-angled, or produced into an angle extremely acute. In regard to size, there are gradations from crabs comparable in look and dimensions to so many little pebbles up to the giant crab of Japan, which, to less than a foot square of carapace, attaches arms portentously extending as much sometimes as a yard and a half on either side. All the crabs have short, more or less insignificant, tails, which they fold closely and moreover tenaciously under their breasts, as though they were appendages not quite dignified for animals of advanced intelligence, and as though in consequence the owners were somewhat touchy about them. The folding of the tail, it is true, is found in some degree in almost all the higher ranks of the crustacea, but not the concealment or the insignificance. On the contrary, the tail part in lobsters, crayfish, prawns, and shrimps is in a fine bold style of architecture; it is used with vigour and displayed with a kind of pomp. In a crab's tail there is nothing to eat. In a crawfish there is comparatively little to eat except what is in the tail. The best known kinds of long-tailed crustaceans in our islands are pretty sharply discriminated in point of size, but it is a mistake to suppose that the scale is everywhere the same. In some parts of the world there are crayfishes as large as our lobsters and in some parts there are prawns larger than our crayfishes. Near akin to the woodlice which we find under stones and slates and decaying leaves and loosened bark, there are numbers of marine animals of the same general structure, with the same number of legs, and the same kind of jaws and eyes and breathing-plates. Among these the show-piece, the prodigy, is a quite modern discovery. Though it has some small and interesting peculiarities of its own, it is in general appearance by no means unlike a woodlouse, but to equal it in dimensions the woodlouse would have to be nine inches long by four inches broad. This hitherto unique monster was dredged up by the American steamer Blake from a depth in the Atlantic of nearly 1,000 fathoms. In the old pharmacopoeia one of the commonest woodlice was applied to the cure of the jaundice. Had it only been known then that the woodlouse was a sort of shrimp, a little land lobster, how much disgust might have been spared to the patient. But that perhaps would have been thought to impair or cancel the efficacy of the medicine. It might well be wondered why of all animals a woodlouse was chosen for a drug, did not the trivial name of Pill Millepede offer an explanation. This crustacean carries the folding of the tail to the length of making one extremity of its body touch the other. It rolls itself into a perfect ball. It is a pill moulded by nature. Who could doubt its medicinal virtue? That it was pounded up in Rhenish wine before being taken was no doubt a late and weak concession to the fancies of fastidious invalids. Those who did not rejoice in good food thus delicately prepared deserved to undergo the alternative remedy, still, it is said, sometimes prescribed, of having to swallow a live spider rolled up in butter. Readers who do not wish to take upon trust the statement that such animals as woodlice and sandhoppers belong to the same class as crabs and lobsters and shrimps, should compare specimens of each kind piece by piece. After some experience the conviction will begin to force itself upon them that the various parts and appendages of all |