Catching shrimps for market is quite an extensive industry, and in France mostly pursued by women, who wade knee deep into the water, pushing before them a net sewed around a hoop at the end of a long stick. A pannier or bag tied around the waist receives the animals from the net. In winter the shrimp retires from the beach into deeper water. It is then caught in boats with nets, made now of galvanized wire, which resists the action of the sea-water and is a great improvement upon the old twine net. In feeding, the shrimp grasps its minute prey by the short rake-like appendages between the legs proper and the tail, and passes it along up to its claws, and then to the mouth. These appendages serve also as a brush when the shrimp makes its toilet. To do this it stands as high as it can on the tips of its long legs, and bends its head and claws under its body, and when these are duly brushed the lobes of the tail are subjected to the same process. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. The Poetical Works of William Blake, Lyrical and Miscellaneous. Edited, with a prefatory memoir, by William Michael Rossetti. Boston: Roberts Brothers. The Poems of William Blake, comprising Songs of Innocence and of Experience, together with Poetical Sketches and some Copyright Poems not in any other edition. London: Basil Montagu Pickering. It does not add to the mere delight of reading Blake's poems to know that in point of time they preceded the writings of Cowper, Wordsworth and Burns, but assuredly it enhances our estimation of their merit, and should have great weight in determining the literary rank of their author. His first volume, called _Poetical Sketches_, printed only for private circulation after lying for six years in manuscript, appeared in 1783, and then only by dint of the kindly efforts of influential and prosperous friends, notably Flaxman the sculptor. The _Sketches_ were written between the ages of twelve and twenty. The _Songs of Innocence and Experience_ appeared between 1787 and 1794, and were united in one volume in the latter year. It is by the poems contained in these two volumes, although he published or left in manuscript many other compositions, most of which are collected in one or the other of the editions now before us, that he is best known. During his lifetime his writings never achieved any general literary success. It fared with his poems as with his paintings, only in a minor degree: they were highly esteemed by the initiated, by his personal friends, by a few men whose keen natural perception of genius enabled them to discern it in spite of the eccentricity and inequality of his work; but to the general public, on whose recognition depends the reputation of the artist, his verses as well as his drawings were a sealed, or at least an enigmatical, book. His verses have no literary atmosphere about them: they smell neither of the midnight oil nor of that smoke of fame the fumes of which Byron