120 Mr. Lovell Reeve on the Pearly Nautilus 



of the Cephalopods by minute dissection, looked with earnest 

 solicitude, no doubt, for the soft and living portion of the 

 Nautilus ; but the act which made at last so prominent a step 

 in the history of these animals was reserved for a no less 

 skilful operator of our own day. A Nautilus was captured in 

 1829 in the Bay of Marekini, at the Island of Erromango, New 

 Hebrides ; it was seen floating on the surface of the water, and 

 was just about to sink, when a sailor caught hold of it with a 

 boat-hook. The right eye was almost shattered in the strug- 

 gle to secure it, and the shell being much broken it was inju- 

 diciously removed. Two years unfortunately elapsed before the 

 soft parts, which were carefully preserved in spirits, reached 

 England : they were presented to Mr. Owen for dissection ; 

 and although a minute portion of shell, adhering to one of the 

 lateral expansions of the belt, was all that remained of the 

 original frame-work, he admirably succeeded, by a train of 

 analogical reasoning, to establish the relation of the whole. 

 His celebrated ' Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus *' was pub- 

 lished in London in 1832 by the Royal College of Surgeons, 

 and to the severe disappointment of the author, the illustrious 

 Cuvier died but a few days before it issued from the press. 



Although the animal of the Nautilus was an important ac- 

 quisition to conchological science, it would have been far more 

 acceptable if accompanied with the shell : a doubt immediately 

 arose amongst naturalists, as to whether the position which 

 Mr. Owen had assigned to the animal in the shell was the 

 true one. ie Mais dans quelle position/' asks De Blainville, 

 e( le Nautile est-il dans sa coquille ?" " And if" says Mr. Gray, 

 " the relative position of the animal of the Nautilus be correctly 

 assigned by Mr. Owen with respect to its shell, it must offer 

 a similar anomaly to the genera Patella and Lottia." 



In 1840 two more specimens of the Nautilus were procured 

 after a long and arduous search, by a Dutch gentleman at New 

 Guinea. One was sent to the public museum of Leyden, and 

 the other to Paris ; but as these also were destitute of their 

 calcareous envelope, an investigation of them could add little 

 to what had been already advanced by Mr. Owen. M. Va- 

 lenciennes, however, with a laudable desire, probably, of emu- 

 lating his predecessor, undertook the dissection, and a skilful 



* The very elaborate character of this memoir directly stamped its author 

 as the first zootomist of the day. The smallest nerve has its immediate office 

 assigned to it, the simplest organ its peculiar function ; the component sy- 

 stems are traced with the most rigorous accuracy, and the inferences that 

 are deduced from a consideration of the whole, exhibit a fertility of imagi- 

 nation that renders an abstruse subject as pleasing as it is full of scientific 

 interest. 



