ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a more detailed investigation of Brooks in an attempt to place his carcinological interests, including the law of larval development, within an appropriate historical context. In fact, Brooks' initial exposure to crustaceans cannot be traced to his personal interests with this taxonomic group. Parenthetically, Brooks' emphasis on the adaptive nature of changes in the larval history of crustaceans and the need for additional investigations of the stages, appears strikingly modern, underscoring the value of his work to modern carcinology. As another indication of Brooks' encouragement to others, he not only appended exhaustive literature surveys to his crustacean papers, but he also introduced students and colleagues to the less available European work. The study was a joint effort to study the poorly understood early developmental stages of Porcellana ocellata, conducted during the same time that Brooks worked on the stomatopods.
