142 S. STILLMAN BERRY. 



animals is concerned, one of that despised species, the "closet 

 naturalist" he can only go a certain way with his subject, and 

 by the same token, his remarks must perforce have only a very 

 limited value. Yet the effort seems worth while spending, and 

 he can fairly plead in extenuation of his temerity, if not of his 

 own limitations, that cephalopods are such active, delicately 

 balanced creatures, and so exquisitely adjusted to an environment 

 in which it is next to impossible to observe them accurately, and 

 which it is even more vain to attempt to establish, even partially, 

 under artificial conditions, that the difficulties of subjecting the 

 details of their life history and ecology to that searching exami- 

 nation required by the standards of modern biological investi- 

 gation have proven practically insurmountable. Therefore the 

 unfortunate circumstance that we have no specialist in this 

 branch, no authoritative student of the bionomics of cephal- 

 opods, and that such halting summarization as can be done must 

 be handled by the systematist or general student of the group, 

 if at all. Admitting then the largely pragmatic and temporary 

 rather than permanently intrinsic value of the present dissertation 

 we may proceed with it, for even so small a contribution as this 

 can pretend to be should prove helpful. 



Amid the wealth of remarkable features, structural and physi- 

 ological, with which the entire group of the Cephalopoda entices 

 the student, the variety and multiplication of those which in 

 an earlier day would have been as unquestioningly as delightedly 

 hailed as adaptive are supremely conspicuous. These are special 

 for the most part to the conditions and vicissitudes brought 

 about by an exceptionally active manner of life in an environ- 

 ment full of actual or potential diversity. Not even the fishes 

 are better swimmers, nor, with all their aristocratic vertebrate 

 organization, lead a more complicated struggle for existence. 

 It is perhaps concomitantly both a result and cause of all this 

 that the group so fairly teems with bizarre cells, tissues, organs, 

 complexes of organs, which, as we may as well admit without 

 further parley, can scarcely be interpreted otherwise than as 

 marvelously exquisite adaptations, each to its own definite end. 

 Such knowledge of most of these as we possess has been amassed 

 almost wholly since the time of Darwin, else the pages of the 



