viscoguened Visitors at the REALS, Museum Two sluggish, living fossils, moving slowly as though oppressed with the weight of the centuries which have flowed by since their Samily-tree began, have, within the past two days, put in an appearance in Shanghai, Reposing in the "Soochow tub of the Royal Asiatic Society's Museum in Museum Road, these curious specimens form a direct link between the present and the "primeval slime" of the world. They are known to the layman as ig Crab and to the scientist as the Limulus and were brought to Shanghai by Mr. Vander Veen who found them in the vicinity of Nimrod Sound. They were presenta? to Mr, A. dec, Sowerby who, after acknowledging their unquestionably distinguished appearance, put them in the Soochow tub already mentioned where they can be seen by anyone wishing to mount the stairs of the Museum to reflect for a moment upon the creatures which crawled before man was important, The King Crab is deserted as an associate of the Trilobites which died out during the Carboniferous Age when the coal fields of the earth were in the making. Strictly speaking, it is not a crab, or crus: tacean, "but an arachnid and direct ancestors were the euryterids Whose fossils have been found convince investigating scientists that China once lay under the ocean. It is pointed out in "A Naturalist's Note-Book in China," by Mr. Sowerby, that the King Crab is a kind of first cousin to the present day scorpion, the latter having spr also from the prehistoric euryterids and having migrated to the land, Teaving the King Crab to the sea, where his preferences for the sandy attorn have not changed to the present time.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.