Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/210

198 have given this brief sketch, is immense in the number of species which compose it; and these have a wide range of size, some being so small as to be only discernible by the microscope, while some are many feet in length. The hugest of them all is a spider-like creature, the Macrocheira or long-armed crab of Japan. The cabinet of Rutgers College, New Jersey, contains one of them. It is the Macrocheira Camperi. We made an actual measure of it, and found that, with its long limbs extended, it had a length of eleven feet six inches. This specimen is probably the largest known.

After a while, a crab ceases to grow. Of course, then all enlargement stops, and. it is no longer necessary for it to get new clothes, as the old ones are large enough. It is liable now to become the victim of the strangest sort of parasitism. In the British Museum is an old crab of the edible species, with some half-dozen oysters of large size growing on its back, which load, ever increasing, the old crab was doomed to carry to the end of its days. A singular piece of imposition—and enough to make crabbed the disposition of the most amiable. Another specimen preserved is that of a hairy crab, whose habit seems to have been to encourage the presence of sponges. And it got "sponged on" with a vengeance, seeing that it is not larger than a walnut, and yet is saddled with a sponge as big as a man's fist.



HOSE who view without prejudice, or with some sympathy, the movements for improving the higher education of women, and for throwing open to them fields of activity from which they are now excluded, have a hard matter of it sometimes to prevent a feeling of reaction being aroused in their minds by the arguments of the most eager of those who advocate the reform. Carried away by their zeal into an enthusiasm which borders on or reaches fanaticism, they seem positively to ignore the fact that there are significant differences between the sexes, arguing in effect as if it were nothing more than an affair of clothes, and to be resolved, in their indignation at woman's wrongs, to refuse her the simple rights of her sex. They would do better in the end if they would begin by realizing the fact that the male organization is one, and the female organization another, and that, let come what may in the way of assimilation of female and male education and labor, it will not be possible to transform a woman into a man. To the end of the chapter she will retain her special functions, and must have a special sphere of development and activity determined by the performance of those functions.