ON THE ARGONAUT. 13 



knowing about him, are not calculated to give to ourselves or 

 others any confidence in the precision of his observations. 



4th. — We have not felt ourselves obliged to believe that 

 this cephalopod was an argonaut-poulp, more especially be- 

 cause his description states that the arms had no membrane 

 at their base, and, as we have seen, although contrary to ob- 

 servations made upon specimens preserved in alcohol, these 

 molluscs possess, if not very large, yet, at least, very visible 

 ones. 



5th. — If we wished to describe one of our " Poulpes a 

 grandes membranes^'' of which Ferussac makes his Veliferes, 

 and a species of which we shall introduce at the end of this 

 memoir, we should choose very nearly the same expressions 

 as M. Rafinesque, so much does his poulp resemble those of 

 this division. 



6th. — An expression made use of by M. de Blainville him- 

 self, shows of itself, all the uncertainty which prevails con- 

 cerning this mollusc. "There have been found," says this 

 naturalist, " in the seas of Sicily, poulps, whose pair of up- 

 per tentacula is spread out in width, probably as in the para- 

 sitic poulps, since they appeared to differ sufficiently from 

 known species to form a distinct genus, under the name of 

 Ocythoe.''^ We shall just observe, that the veliferous poulps 

 are common in the Mediterranean, and particularly in the 

 seas of Sicily and Italy ^ and, that at the epoch when this 

 traveller made his discovery, and even at that when M. de 

 Blainville published his article, * Poulpe du Dictionnaire,' 

 no other species was known. 



It would be the same with the argument w^hich it has been 

 attempted to draw from the two poulps Ocythoe that Ranzani 

 had in his possession : they were in alcohol, and one of them 

 moreover carried the fragments of the shell. 



The partisans of parasitism bring forward yet another ar- 

 gument, to which we believe it easy to reply, so as to make 

 it valueless ; they say, that it is not always the same species 

 of poulp that we find in the same species of shell. Their 

 adversaries seek to demonstrate its non-parasitic nature, by 

 sustaining, that it is always precisely the same. Which are 

 we to believe ? As for ourselves, our opinion upon this sub- 

 ject was formed long ago ; and we endeavoured to prove it 

 in the ' Bulletin Universel des Sciences,' by citing an occa- 

 sion when we had been able to examine a great number of 

 these animals, some occupying the Argonauta Argo and others 

 the rice- grained argonaut. We then easily convinced our- 

 selves that the same species always inhabited the same shell ; 

 for we never found in one those that we discovered in the 



