ingenious speculation within five miles of his subject
from being drawn into it. His next chapter is
upon the plants found growing upon crabs'-
shell. This suggests curious questions of the
relation between plants and minerals, with
mention of several authorities who vouch for
trees near the gold-mines of Monomatapa,
which, by sucking up the metal, produce golden
branches; and there were said also to be vines
in the whole tract of the river Maine producing
golden leaves for the same reason. Again,
Joachim Becher had testified in his Metallurgy,
that he had seen in Hungary a vine planted over
a vein of gold, which vine not only had its stem
twisted with gold threads, but yielded,
moreover, granules of fine gold in some of the grape
pips. Conrad Rubeaquensis had recorded the
case of a spike of barley growing out of a
woman's nose. Doctor Sachs cites authority
for the germination of a cherry-stone within
the ear. Nearer to the case of the crabs is that
of the great whales, whose backs were said to
be sometimes covered, on the part commonly
above water, with so much vegetation that they
have been mistaken for islands.

But now, at last, the learned doctor gets to
his tailed river crabs, which are more properly
lobsters, and starts with a chapter on the
different uses, poetical, botanical, surgical, and
pathological, of the crab's name. There is a
dangerous tumour, for example, named crab
(cancer), because the swollen veins around it
look like a crab's legs; it is also hard like a
crab, and, like a lobster (for the word cancer
included all the family), it holds tight where it
has fixed its claw, and Paracelsus saw another
analogy in the fact that the tumour is red like a
boiled lobster.

Then follows the picture and description of
the common Silesian river crab, or fresh-water
lobster, not instantly distinguishable from a sea
lobster; and this is the gammarus upon which
the doctor mainly founds his Curious
Gammarology.

The description is not quite so matter of fact
as the scientific description of an animal now-a-
days is. For example, two centuries ago it had
to be told of the lobster's or crab's eyes, how
Kircher held that their light was concreated with
them, that they were at once eyes and candles, so
that the creatures saw with their own lanterns.
Various analogous wonders of this sort are cited,
including the fact that the glow-worm voids
light enough by his bowels to enable him to
find his way of nights.

When he comes to the claws, the doctor tells
a case, reported by Schenk, of a man who had
lobster's claws instead of fingers; from this the
wonderful store of his reading tempts him only
to a very short trot round the subject of marks
made upon children by the imagination of their
mothers; but when he comes to what has been
said of the crab's walking backwards, and quotes
the French poet who had sung that the star of
France must be under the crab, he has a word
for the crab-like progress of the art of medicine
since its heroic days, and pours the vials of his
wrath over, or washes with the lotion, or anoints
with the ointment thereof, the whole multiform
race of quacks who had brought so noble an art
into discredit.

Many wonderful things are then told of the
generation of crabs, and next we come to the
use continued long after Dr. Sachs's time of
Crabs' Eyes as a medicine. Though called
eyes, they were not eyes, but little lumps
looking like eyes of other animals, of which two are
to be found within the shell at the top of the
crab's head at the season when the animal is
casting the old shell and forming a new one.
This suggests discussion of the occurrence of
stone within various animals, and of the disease
of the stone in man.

The great question why should a black
lobster turn red when it is boiled, is next
discussed. That involves the theories of that
day as to the cause of colour, the nearest to
the truth being Kenelm Digby's opinion that
various colours proceed from the various
mechanical arrangements of a surface that produce
various methods of reflecting light. There is a
long incidental list, also, of all named colours.
A softening of the surface of the lobster's shell
in cooking might, according to Kenelm Digby's
theory, so rearrange the particles as to change
the refraction. Scarmilion ascribed the change
to the withdrawal of water out of the shell by
effect of heat. Others said that the change was
chemical and due to salt, or to action of the
principle of sulphur as a source of colour, and
others mixed up a vague sulphur theory with a
supposed relation of sulphur to the inborn light
or phosphorescence of the crab. When it was
found that certain lobsters with very thick shells
did not turn red at all, that was ascribed to the
impediment offered by the thick shell to the
sublimation of the sulphur.

To prove that lobsters and crabs are reasoning
animals, it is urged that they are good patriots,
for they stick to their homes; the hermit crab gets
praise for being an economist; and lobsters and
crabs are declared to be good astrologers, because
of the attention paid by them to the phases of
the moon in regulation of their lives. They
are well-armed, strenuous warriors, and fight
duels with each other for the ladies of their
choice. Hereupon, off rides the doctor for a
round of curious talk upon the wars of animals,
including cock-fighting, but he gets back to his
special subject in description of a fight between
a lobster and a cuttle-fish, and of course he is
soon in the thick of Homer's fighting crabs in
the Batracho myomachia.

There we leave him, although we are only
half way through the thick of his book, which
has yet to discuss hibernation, deposit of shell,
renewal of cast claws (which topic does not fail
to suggest to him the renewal of men's noses by
the Taliacotian operation), the mutations of
crabs in accordance with the phases of the moon,
their longevity; their food; how to catch crabs,
how to eat them, with dissertation upon ancient
luxury as regards fishes; the art of cooking
lobsters and crabs as practised in the earliest