incensed with any adulatory person, Oriental or
otherwise, who informed him that he, the
sultan, was destined to live for ever.

A LOBSTER SALAD.

THE man who is curious in crabs and lobsters
should raise the ghost of DOCTOR PHILIP SACHS,
member of the Silesian Society of the Curious in
Nature. Such a supper of lobsters and crabs as
he gave his readers in a book that he wrote just
two centuries ago—it was published at Wratislaw
two hundred years ago plus one—and such
pictures as he had engraved for it, in which one of
the wonders is a reversal of the ordinary course
of things into a lobster eating a man, instead of
a man eating a lobster—such a book and such
pictures ought to have made his name immortal;
but they did not. Philip Sachs and his Society
of Curious Men were a body of intelligent
practitioners of medicine, doing in their own
way, without patronage, what our Royal Society
had then begun to do in London, for
independent experimental research into nature, such as
the Baconian philosophy had counselled. We
live, nevertheless, in a day that knows not Philip
Sachs, and makes a joke of such curious science
as his was; although it did represent the first
energy of departure from traditional faith in
the ancients. Here is a book, indeed, to fall
now into the hands of men who never heard of
"Gammarology," and hardly know that
kammaros is Greek, and cammarus or gammarus,
which ever it pleases them to say, is Latin
for crab and lobster! Doctor Sachs,
nevertheless, was well loved and deservedly honoured
in his own day by his own comrades, who
would have liked, they said, to put themselves
into personal communication with the new
English Royal Society, if they had not been hard-
working practitioners who cultivated science in
the intervals of professional work, and had
neither time nor influential help to speed their
good will. A tremendous chorus of song from
his learned friends in Germany brings Dr. Sachs's
Gammarologia Curiosa, with votive verses of
applause, into the reader's presence.

This pleasant experimental philosopher cites
a series of fables that passed for truths, gives
the authority for them, and adds with his own
assent the authority of practical research against
them. Such were the notions that the
salamander will not burn in fire, that the hunted
beaver gnawed off the part for which it was then
pursued, that a bear licks her cubs into shape,
that lightning cannot strike the laurel, that the
lion trembles with fear at the crowing of a cock.
A prince of Bavaria turned a lion into a
farmyard where several cocks crowed lustily, but the
lion chased and ate both cocks and hens.
Other old errors of this sort are the belief that
the viper kills its mother; that a serpent's body
can be burst by singing to it; that the bird
Manucodiata had no feet, and was, therefore,
always flying; that goat's blood would dissolve
adamant; that the chameleon lived on air; and
the story of the phœnix. But for the song of
swans, Dr. Sachs found satisfactory authority,
including the report of the Norwegian Olaus
Wormius, confirmed upon oath, that by the
seashore he had often heard a strange and most
sweet murmur of whistling mixed with delightful
sounds from flocks of swans; and Paulus
Melissus, who was himself called the Swan of
Poets (he lived, we may add, in Shakespeare's
time), heard a swan singing on the Thames near
London.

Now for the experimental science of crabs as
it stood with this lively and liberal naturalist
two hundred years ago. Animals, he said, are
perfect or imperfect. The perfect have blood;
the imperfect have, instead of blood, another
fluid. The bloodless animals are sub-divided
into insects, with distinct incisions in their bodies;
the soft skinned; the crustaceous, protected
with a slight crust; and the testacean, which are
covered with a hard testa or shell: Dr. Sachs's
book, which recognises the whole crab tribe, is,
in fact, an old natural history treatise upon the
still recognised class of crustaceans. And were
they not worthy of a treatise? Did not Dorian
say that crabs found a man in employment, and
delight, and speculation. And, as said Scaliger,
you find them everywhere, in sweet and in salt
water, on earth, enjoying the air, and for us
made enjoyable by help of fire. Roman
emperors are said to have fished with nets of gold
and silken cord dyed crimson and purple. I,
said the doctor, prefer my quiet and cheap hunt
after different sorts of crabs, and my study of
their characters and habits. I don't write my
tale as Oppian did his verses, in letters of gold,
and I shall not get gold for my labour, as that
Oppian did; there is no Septimus Severus to
give me two thousand gold pieces for two
thousand lines. Then he gravely, but with a twinkle,
doubtless, in his eye as he wrote, stated in his
treatise that by the command of his Society of
Curiosi he wrote of crabs after writing of wine
in his Ampelographia, because crab is not
wholesome unless taken with wine, and that it is good
to add crab to wine is shown by Dioscorides,
who tells us that river crabs cooked with the
tendrils of the white vine are good against the
bite of a mad dog. How pleasant and perennial
is the genial naturalist spirit. Good humour, if
not gold, seems to have been in all times one of
the very constant rewards of a direct out-of-
door study of God's handiwork.

The doctor describes the genera of
crustacea, ending with an argument for the
existence of underground rivers in which swim
fossil (but not petrified) fishes, which, as some
of the ancients found, were of unpleasant taste;
occasionally even hurtful. There were even
believed to be fishes living underground
without water, and these notions of fossil life were
applied to the study of petrifactions. If other
fishes, why not crabs? which in ordinary
circumstances are amphibious, and can find food
within the earth, in the great cellar of the
universe, or living in caves underground near
marshy places, at the call of hunger rise out of