llion herrings a year as they come
in to spawn, butcher his fellow air-breather, the whale, or haul now and
then an unlucky king-crab or strange sea-urchin out of the deep water,
in the name of science; but the life of the sea as a whole knows him
not, plays out its slow drama of change and development unheeding him,
and may in the end, in mere idle sport, throw up some new terrestrial
denizens, some new competitor for space to live in and food to live
upon, that will sweep him and all his little contrivances out of
existence, as certainly and inevitably as he has swept away auk, bison,
and dodo during the last two hundred years.

For instance, there are the Crustacea. As a group the crabs and lobsters
are confined below the high-water mark. But experiments in air-breathing
are no doubt in progress in this group--we already have tropical
land-crabs--and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future
these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In
the past we have the evidence of the fossil _Paradoxides_ that creatures
of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering
their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as
formidable a creature as one could well imagine. And their amphibious
capacity would give them an advantage against us such as at present is
only to be found in the case of the alligator or crocodile. If we
imagine a shark that could raid out upon the land, or a tiger that could
take refuge in the sea, we should have a fair suggestion of what a
terrible monster a large predatory crab might prove. And so far as
zoological science goes we must, at least, admit that such a creature is
an evolutionary possibility.

Then, again, the order of the Cephalopods, to which belong the
cuttle-fish and the octopus (sacred to Victor Hugo), may be, for all we
can say to the contrary, an order with a future. Their kindred, the
Gastropods, have, in the case of the snail and slug, learnt the trick of
air-breathing. And not improbably there are even now genera of this
order that have escaped the naturalist, or even well-known genera whose
possibilities in growth and dietary are still unknown. Suppose some day
a specimen of a new species is caught off the coast of Kent. It excites
remark at a Royal Society soiree, engenders a Science Note or so, "A
Huge Octopus!" and in the next year or so three or four other specimens
come to hand, and the thing becomes famili