It has two brain systems, head and body; but to concentrate its power thus, it must have no neck; head and body must be undivided, a dual unity. Marvellous, perfectly marvellous, simplification! The head combines eyes, feelers, claws and jaws. When the quick eye has discerned the enemy, or the prey, the feelers touch, the claws grasp, the jaws crush, and, immediately behind them, the stomach, which is itself furnished with a strong crushing machinery, triturates and digests whatever enters it. In an instant the prey is seized, crushed, digested, and disappears. In this creature, every organ is superior. The eyes can discern, both in front, and in rear. Convexed, exterior, and _en facettes_, they can, at a glance, sweep almost the entire horizon. The antennæ, the feelers, organs of touch and trial, of warning and of guiding, have the sense of touch at their extremities, of hearing and of scent, at their base. An immense advantage, such as we do not possess. How would it be if the human hand could hear and smell? How rapid and concentrated would then be our power of observation. Divided among three senses, each of which works independently of the other, our impressions are, for that very reason, very often inexact or evanescent. Of the ten feet of the Decapodes, six are hands, hard, griping pincers, and, moreover, are, at their extremeties, organs of respiration. And in this last particular our singularly armed warrior, by a quite revolutionary expedient, solves the problem which so much embarrassed our poor mollusc; how to breathe, in spite of the shell. To this he calmly replies: "I breathe through hand and foot. This great, this fatal difficulty of breathing, which would so surely overcome me, I overcome by the very same weapon with which I smite, the very same implement by which I seize and masticate my food."