Crossword-Solution: ARTHROPODS 10 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 16

The first-named and lower division comprises the class of the CRUSTACEA,--arthropods protected by a hard exterior skeleton, or "crust,"--of which crabs, crayfish, and lobsters are familiar examples.

The aquatic arthropods, the Crustacea, culminated before the air breathers; and while none of the latter are found in the Cambrian, the former were the dominant life of the time in numbers, in size, and in the variety of their forms.

The vertebrates had now followed the arthropods and the mollusks upon the land, and had evolved a higher type adapted to the new environment.

Soil life forms increase in complexity to microscopic round worms called nematodes, various kinds of mollusks like snails and slugs (many so tiny the gardener has no idea they are populating the soil), thousands of almost microscopic soil-dwelling members of the spider family that zoologists call arthropods, the insects in all their profusion and complexity, and, of course, certain larger soil animals most of us are familiar with such as moles.

What between Kowalesky and his Ascidians, Miklucho-Maclay [A Russian naturalist, and close friend of Haeckel's, who later adventured himself alone among the cannibals of New Guinea.] and his Fish-brains, and you and your Arthropods, I am becoming schwindelsuchtig, and spend my time mainly in that pious ejaculation "Donner and Blitz," in which, as you know, I seek relief.