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Sea-Scorpions

"And some rin up the hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to pieces wi' hammers like sae many road-makers run daft. They say 'tis to see how the warld was made." -Scott, St. Ronan's Well, OUR first group of monsters is taken from a tribe of armed warriors that lived in the seas of a very ancient period in the world's history. Like the crabs and lobsters inhabiting the coasts of Britain, they possessed a coat of armour, and jointed bodies, supplied with limbs for crawling, swimming, or seizing their prey. They were giants in their day, far eclipsing in size any of their relations that have lived on to the present time. Some of them, such as the Pterygotus (Fig. 6, p. 51), attained a length of nearly six feet.

There are no living creatures quite like them. Certainly they are not true lobsters, and yet we may consider them to be first or second cousins of those ten-footed crustaceans of the present day-lobsters, crabs, and shrimps, so welcome on the tables of both rich and poor. Some naturalists say that their nearest relations at the present day are the king-crabs inhabiting the China seas and the east coast of North America; and there certainly are some points of resemblance between them. Others say 1 Crustaceans are a class of jointed creatures (articulate animals), possessing a hard shell or crust (Lat. crusta), which they cast periodically. They all breathe by gills.