Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/218

Rh tail, and whisked himself over the smooth lip of the shell into its tube with a rapid adroitness that was perfectly marvellous. And then in his new contrasted position he looked so funny—such at-homeishness there was in it; he was so different from the poor houseless vagabond with a drivelling tail, that one had seen miserably crawling about a moment before: he looked right up in your face and said, as plainly as looks can speak, 'How d'ye do? here I am, quite at home already. I never saw it without laughing.

The Prawns are particularly pleasing inhabitants of the Aquarium. There is a certain lightness in the slender filiform appendages of the head, which are continually thrown into the most graceful curves, that resembles in character "the light tracery of ropes and spars" so much admired in a trimly rigged ship. Their bodies are so pellucid that a lady who was this moment looking at the Tank compared them to ghosts, and their smooth gliding movements aid the similitude. The beautiful colours which adorn them I have described elsewhere, and shall merely here say that the fine contrasts of the black-margined lines of pale yellow with the pellucid grey of the ground, show well as the animals rest on the dark stones. The two species (P. serratus and P. squilla) are so closely alike in their colours and in the distribution of these, that it is only by minute examination and comparison that we can determine what is characteristic of each. The most obvious distinction is, that in the former the outer tail-plate has a yellow line, the intermediate one no