This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. Learn more
The great Arthropod class, the Crustacea, presents to the zoologist at the present day an immense range of forms,.
The essential difference between these two kinds of eye appears to be that the Chaetopod eye (in its higher developments) is a vesicle enclosing the lens, whereas the Arthropod eye is a pit or series of pits into which the heavy chitinous cuticle dips and enlarges knobwise as a lens.
It is not true that all the biting processes of the Arthropod limb are thus produced - for instance, the jaws of Peripatus are formed by the axis or corm itself, whilst the poisonjaws of Chilopods, as also their maxillae, appear to be formed rather by the apex or terminal region of the ramus of the limb; but the opposing jaws (= hemignaths) of Crustacea, Arachnida and Hexapoda are gnathobases, and not the axis or corm.
The principal forms assumed by the Arthropod parapodium and its rami may be thus enumerated: (1) Axial corm well developed, unsegmented or with two to four segments; lateral endites and exites (rami) numerous and of various lengths (certain 8 limbs of lower After Lankester, Q.
On the other hand, we cannot refuse to admit that any of the processes of an Arthropod parapodium may become modified as branchial organs, and that, as a rule, branchial out-growths are easily developed, de novo, in all the higher groups of animals.