Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/449

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FISH AND CRUSTACEA OBTAINED IN CORNWALL.
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water left by the receding tide), but the second was taken in deep water in my trammel, enclosed in a sort of nest made of sea-weed and sand, which had all the appearances of being worked up arti- ficially. I noted of the hindmost pair of legs of this little crab that it never used them, or even displayed them whilst alive. They were kept tucked up under the back of the carapace (or close along- side of it), over the other legs, and were but very rarely moved, and never both together.

I had a second Long-legged Spider Crab from the deep water covered with little bits of sea-weed, not, I think, growing, but stuck on to it in some way. Most of the weed consisted of little fragments of some of the common Delessariæ. I took also the Common Crab (C. pagurus), the Lobster, the Cray-fish, the Velvet Swimming Crab (the Blue Harry, P. puber), and on my last day the rare swimming crab, Portunus Holsatus, the Livid Swimmer. The specimen was in excellent condition, and I saved it out of my trammel whole, but some rough handling has since unfortunately crushed in the back part of the carapace. I had also Xanthus florida and rivulosa (in my opinion varieties of the same crab), and the Common Shore Crab. On the 22ud August we observed from the shore a shoal of some sort of fish passing in the very unusual direction of from east to west. It appeared to be broad and of about a half a mile in length. I afterwards learned from a boat which passed through it that it was a shoal of large-sized jelly-fish, probably Rhizostoma Cuvieri, the most common jelly-fish on our coast, and of which I took two or three specimens in the course of the month.

Early in the month I took the Common Cuttle-fish, Eledone octopedia of Leach and Gosse, and Loligo piscatorum of Rymer Jones. After that I took the Bomb Cuttle, so called, I believe, from the resemblance of its sac to a bomb or mortar. This I consider to be Sepia officinalis, and to have by some writers been confounded with Eledone and Loligo, but it is quite distinct. Both have sepia- bags, and are consequently occasionally nuisances from their habits of "squirting ink," but a clear distinction is that the backbone of the Cuttle-fish (which I regard as Eledone and Loligo) is horn-like and semitransparent, whilst that of the Bomb Cuttle (which I take to be Sepia officinalis), is the white opaque substance known to every one as the backbone of the Cuttle-fish. There are other exterior and clear distinctions to which I need not now refer.

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