Species of Peneus live in the European seas, as well as here, and their
Nauplius-brood has no doubt repeatedly passed unnoticed through the
hands of the numerous naturalists who have investigated those seas, as
well as through my own,* for it has nothing which could attract
particular attention amongst the multifarious and often wonderful
Nauplius-forms. (* Mecznikow has recently found Naupliiform
shrimp-larvae in the sea near Naples.) When I, fancying from the
similarity of its movements that it was a young Peneus-Zoea, had for the
first time captured such a larva, and on bringing it under the
microscope found a Nauplius differing toto coelo from this Zoea, I might
have thrown it aside as being completely foreign to the developmental
series which I was tracing, if the idea of early Naupliiform stages of
the higher Crustacea, which indeed I did not believe to be still extant,
had not at the moment vividly occupied my attention.
And if I had not long been seeking among the Edriophthalma for traces of
the supposititious Zoea-state, and seized with avidity upon everything
that promised to made this refractory Order serviceable to me, Van
Beneden's short statement could hardly have affected me so much in the
manner of an electric shock, and impelled me to a renewed study of the
Tanaides, especially as I had once before plagued myself with them in
the Baltic, without getting any further than my predecessors, and I have
not much taste for going twice over the same ground.
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