What was your own infant experience, my limulus? Fifty days, or seventy days, perhaps more,[49] you lay hidden in the egg, because all those changes which other crustaceans undergo after hatching, the royal limulus completes in the privacy of its elastic case. Change, change, still change, within the curtains of the cradle, and at last, out comes the living limulus, tailless, large-eyed, its hinder segments free of each other. Spiny, tiny, pale brown, glossy, a shell finer than a human baby’s most delicate finger nail, able to swim, to find your own food, to double up and protect yourself, such you were, O limulus, on coming out of the egg. You needed no parent to guard you, or forage for you; the sun had warmed you into life, and the ocean was your food-bringing mother. Child of the sun and sea! Such the ancients fabled Venus, the queen of beauty, and you, O my limulus, are one of the most uncomely of living things. When first you found your egg-case cleft away, and came out upon the wave, six pairs of feet were ready for your walking, swimming, and food-grasping apparatus. So well endowed with members for use, and with no brain capable of large ambitions, content with to-day, and ignorant that there was ever a yesterday, or that there will be a to-morrow, you, no more than a child of the house of Hapsburg, expected beauty to be united to the splendor of-- A Very Ancient Line. FOOTNOTES: [49] Dr. Lockwood kept some king-crab eggs in a dark place, three hundred and sixty days before they hatched. LESSON XXII. THE MARVEL IN MAIL. “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapors weep their burden to the ground, Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan, Us only cruel immortality consumes.” --TENNYSON. The first five lessons in this Nature Reader, No. 4, were devoted to a description of some of the prominent facts of the periods during which our globe was built up from an immense sphere of fiery gas, to the compact and inhabited earth which we know to-day. The next theme of study was the solar system, under the laws governing which our world exists, part of which it is, and upon the members of which, the sun and the moon, we are so dependent that without them life on our globe would be impossible. That magic power whereby the plant world grows and ripens its fruits abides in the sunlight. It is the sun’s heat which raises water from the earth in vapor, which returns to us in showers and dew. It is that same forceful heat, poured out on vast continents, that gives rise to the winds that cool our summers and speed the sails of our commerce. During how many ages has this lavish sunlight stored up coal for our use, that coal which flames in our grates and stoves, glows in our gas-lights, and drives the engines of our age of steam!