Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/263

Rh gastroliths is stored away for the molting season a reservoir of material to form a new shell. The children, having no knowledge of the real use of the gastroliths, believe them to be a providential arrangement for the relief of pain in man, and for generations this belief has been entertained by adults, for the gastroliths are really the commercial eye-stones that were once widely used to remove any irritating particle from the eye; but the practice is now condemned by physicians. It is scarcely possible that there is any power sui generis in these neat little bodies which an artificial fac-simile would not possess. Very likely this widely credited virtue of the eye-stones is a result of the varied use in medicine of the European crayfish in past ages. Powdered gastroliths were formerly used in Europe as an antacid, while Pliny cites a score of prescriptions in which the crushed animal, the bruised flesh, the juice expressed from it, macerations in various liquids, or the incinerated and pulverized shell were recommended for all sorts of purposes from antidoting poisons to allaying fevers.

Some time ago I heard a very notable New England housekeeper ask a young girl, who was assisting her by preparing a lobster for the tea-table, if she had been careful to remove the "lady." In answer to my inquiry as to what was meant by this, I was told that there is a part known as the "lady"—a small, greenish object inside the lobster, which is a perfect image of a tiny woman seated in a chair—and that this part of the animal is deadly poison, and should therefore always be carefully removed in preparing the flesh for the table. I find that, in general throughout Massachusetts, this name of "lady" is given to the stomach, which may be imagined to bear a remote resemblance to a miniature woman. Since the lobster is a notorious sea-scavenger, the contents of the stomach would probably be very undesirable for food, though why this stigma of being poisonous should need to be attached to the hard, calcareous-toothed, inedible stomach-walls it would not be easy to tell. In central New Hampshire the name "lady" is sometimes applied to the intestine—the dark tube running lengthwise of the lobster's body—and this is considered poisonous. In Cambridge, Mass., an intelligent fish-dealer, on being questioned as to the nature and position of the "lady" in the lobster, designated by that name the edible ovary popularly called the "coral." An ingenious theory has been propounded to me to explain the cause of the so-called "lady" being dangerously poisonous. The reasoning was about as follows: "You know that lobsters must be alive when they are dropped into hot water to be cooked. If you should let them die before they are cooked, they would be poison and not fit to eat, and I suppose that the poison, which before they are cooked is scattered everywhere through its whole body, all goes into the "lady" while the lobster is being boiled."