Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/131

CRUSTACEANS The latter half of the nineteenth century was a period the most stirring and the most fruitful for natural history that the world has ever known. To promote the study of it clubs, societies, associations either sprang up afresh or were quickened into renewed and more vigorous activity over a wide area. A persistent and varied industry was thus excited, the results of which, after being orally explained and discussed within a small circle, were afterwards in many cases with more or less com- pleteness printed and published. Though no doubt this was often done only to gratify an author or a little coterie of friends, the unintended con- sequences were not unimportant. The collected reports were frequently to a high degree miscellaneous. There was little editorial sifting of wheat from chaff. The circulation was usually very limited. Hence it has come to pass that on science is laid a twofold burden ; first the task of searching for publications often far from easy to meet with, and then the task of discovering whether there are any useful facts or opinions to be gleaned from them on any particular theme out of the wilderness of all possible themes which they are capable of embracing. The Abstract of Proceedings and Transactions of the Bedfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club, beginning with the year 1876, is very much a case in point. A perusal of these records at the library of the National Museum in Cromwell Road is a pleasant enough study in itself, but in regard to the crustaceans of the county the information to be derived from it is scanty in the extreme. In a way the carcinologist is debarred from complaining, seeing that a far more popular subject is exposed to equal neglect. For Mr. W. B. Graham exclaims in this very abstract : ' Multitudinous, however, as the insect fauna of Bedford- shire unquestionably is, yet in the entomological world the county is almost wholly ignored.' * In words to precisely the same effect it may be declared that, multitudinous as the crustacean fauna of Bedfordshire unquestionably is, yet in the carcinological world the county is almost wholly ignored. Of the higher Malacostraca only one species is here to be expected, and that by good hap satisfies expectation, since Mr. James Saunders, A.L.S., writing from Luton, January 19, 1902, kindly informs me that 'crayfish are abundant in the river Lea south of Luton Hoo.' 3 This lobster-like macruran, Potamobius pallipes (Lereboullet), the river cray- fish, should certainly not be neglected. Professor Huxley, taking its 1 Abs. Proc. Trans. Beds Nat. Hist. Soc. and Field Club for the year 1876-7 (Jan. 1, 1878), p. 127. 8 Lysons, Magna Britannia (1806), i. 21, mentions it 'among the fish of the Ouse.' 91