What ancient family of humans in all this world, Mistress Limulus, but is modern as the last new fashion, compared with your hoary antiquity of lineage? Mongol or Hindoo, Russian or Saracen, Emperor of Austria or King of Italy, who of them can count grandfathers with you? Compared to you all Adam’s line are but of yesterday. If you had been a reasoning being, and capable of handing down traditions, all the lore of all the ages might now be hidden under that vast head-shield. Limulus, or horseshoe crab, or king crab, whichever you prefer to be called, do you know that the last age of your race has come, and you are bearing down on extinction? The seas of China and Japan, and this ancient eastern coast of North America, still cherish you and your relatives; but the hapless fortunes of the times, the elements, and man the pitiless, have doomed you, and soon the day will come when not a limulus of you all will survive, except in the cases of museums. The doom of your old-time, far-off cousins, the trilobites, is upon you. Let me trace you back to your origin; for the rocks, more faithful than your dull and imperfect brain-cell, hold your history. Very modestly, as if hesitating whether you would be entertained in the world’s great hostelry, one small and insignificant species of your race arrived in the Upper Silurian age. You found the seas warm, the sunshine tempered by vapors, the stone lilies white as that then unknown thing, snow; the coral polyps like rainbows shimmered in the waters. You ate, swam, and were happy. You throve; you lived unobserved through Devonian days, and, ah, what vast mud beds, black with the decay of moss and ferns, awaited you in the Coal period! Seven species more came into your enlarging race, but you were humble still, and remained small and unobtrusive, lest some vast reptile should end your family line in his capacious maw. One of your species, however, seized with ambition, developed beyond all the rest, and here in America grew into the size and shape you wear to-day. Fortune favored the bold, and the enterprising Yankee limulus stands at the head of your tribes until now. Back there in the Coal period your family were most of them weak, and wore the form not of adult king crabs, but of larvæ, with all the segments of the hinder shield free of each other; and that brave tail was but a rudimentary thorn. Perhaps this very humility, intense as that of Uriah Heep, has engineered you through the convulsions of the ages, to be the fellow citizens, and alas! the victims of the human race.