Having determined to make the attempt, I had in the first place to
decide upon some particular class. The choice was necessarily limited to
those the chief forms of which were easily to be obtained alive in some
abundance. The Crabs and Macrurous Crustacea, the Stomapoda, the
Diastylidae, the Amphipoda and Isopoda, the Ostracoda and Daphnidae, the
Copepoda and Parasita, the Cirripedes and Rhizocephala of our coast,
representing the class of Crustacea with the deficiency only of the
Phyllopoda and Xiphosura, furnished a long and varied, and at the same
time intimately connected series, such as was at my command in no other
class. But even independently of this circumstance the selection of the
Crustacea could hardly have been doubtful. Nowhere else, as has already
been indicated by various writers, is the temptation stronger to give to
the expressions "relationship, production from a common fundamental
form," and the like, more than a mere figurative signification, than in
the case of the lower Crustacea. Among the parasitic Crustacea,
especially, everybody has long been accustomed to speak, in a manner
scarcely admitting of a figurative meaning, of their arrest of
development by parasitism, as if the transformation of species were a
matter of course. It would certainly never appear to any one to be a
pastime worthy of the Deity, to amuse himself with the contrivance of
these marvellous cripplings, and so they were supposed to have fallen by
their own fault, like Adam, from their previous state of perfection.
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