A Treatise on Diseases of the Bones (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Treatise on Diseases of the Bones

In many of the Crustacea, some of whom, as the crab and the lobster, are entirely encased in a calcareous envelope, the difficulty is met by a process of throwing off the skeleton entirely, and providing a new and larger one, proportionate to the increase in size of the animal. A similar action is oh served in some of the changes which take place, during the development of several species of the Insecta. This process of the periodical shedding of the shell is a very curious and interesting one, and it may enable us to appreciate somewhat better the difficulty of the problem we are now studying, to watch the tedious, difficult, and one would think painful ex ertions which these animals have to undergo, in order to free themselves from a covering which has simply become too small for them, and has by this clumsy process to be got rid of, to make way for a larger one. The imperfection, if we may so speak, of the mode is still more strikingly shown by the nu protected and helpless condition in which the unhappy animal is left after casting off its old coat, and before the new one is firm enough to be available.

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