ON THE ARGONAUT. 523 



lias made upon thepoulp of the argonaut, by means of which 

 she has ascertained that this mollusc repairs the fractures 

 which may happen to its shell. Being ourselves then at 

 Algiers, where these animals sometimes abound, we wished 

 to try the experiment, and in order to accomplish it repeated 

 step by step the mode of procedure which had been so fa- 

 vourable to that lady's observations. 



We had also another end in view, that of doing justice, if, 

 as we believed, there was occasion to do so, to all those mar- 

 vellous things, which, since the time of Aristotle, so many 

 naturalists have so complaisantly repeated, concerning the 

 navigation with sail and oar, of this mollusc. 



To arrive at a conviction of the incorrectness of these re- 

 citals, we had but one means to employ, which was to find 

 out the true use of the very dilatable elliptic lobes borne by 

 two of the arms of the poulp, and which naturalists had so 

 picturesquely considered as the sailing apparatus of this new 

 species of navigator; a point which no one that we are 

 aware of has yet thought of studying, although many profess 

 to have seen the mollusc in a living state ; and which never- 

 theless, if once well ascertained, may be of great weight in 

 the decision of the question still pending, as to whether the 

 poulp holds its property in the shell by right of birth or by 

 right of conquest. 



We shall first remark that we succeeded completely in a 

 repetition of Madame Power's experiment. A fracture in one 

 of these shells, the animal of which lived six days in our 

 basin, was found repaired and completely closed ; but not- 

 withstanding our inclination to adopt the poulp with palma- 

 ted arms as the true constructor of the argonaut, we could not, 

 like that lady, consider the experiment as conclusive, in a 

 discussion which is supported on all sides by so many facts 

 and objections, and in which investigations have gone so far 

 without being able to settle the question entirely. In fact 

 the renovated part is but a thin transparent plate, a mere dia- 

 phragm which has neither the texture, solidity, nor white- 

 ness of the rest of the shell, and taking an irregular form as 

 if it had not been produced by the same means and the same 

 organs ; in a word it reminds us exactly of what happens 

 among snails when the shell is broken ; and we know that in 

 that case, the collier l of the animal which alone has produced 

 the shell, does not assist in the work of reparation. 



However this may be, the fact of which Madame Power 

 has apprised us is new, and an interesting circumstance in 



1 Collier' — the thickened and glandular margin of the mantle. — Ed. 



