148 VERANY AND YOGT ON THE HECTOCOTYLT 



open by two little lateral papillae into the respiratory cavity. 

 These apertures are very distant from the funnel, and are placed 

 altogether at the sides of the cavity. 



The investigations which have been set forth in the preceding 

 pages ought, we think, to furnish a very complete solution of 

 this important question concerning the nature of the Hectocotyli 

 which has been agitated now for some years. Accepting the 

 results of MM. Siebold and Kolliker, and the conclusions which 

 they drew, one was still struck by a something surprising and 

 in strange contradiction with certain zoological principles which 

 were believed to be firmly established. Among these Cephalo- 

 pods — so similar for the rest in their external and internal struc- 

 ture — there were, according to this view, to be found kinds 

 which could hardly be distinguished generically, and yet in which 

 the difference between the organization of the male and that of 

 the female was carried to its greatest extent. According to this 

 view, females endowed with all the complicated and highly deve- 

 loped organs of the Cephalopoda possess males which previous 

 observ^ers had taken for intestinal worms, and w^hich in any case 

 were so poorly organized that independent life seemed refused to 

 them ; and so strange an exception, an example of which is 

 hardly to be found in the animal kingdom*, was to be found in 

 species side by side with others, in which the males were or- 

 ganized as completely as the females. It w^as evidently a ques- 

 tion which ought to be in the highest degree interesting to zoo- 

 logists, and we are rejoiced to believe that the solution we offer, 

 and which we believe to be definitive, will not remain without 

 influence in preventing for the future similar mistakes. 



It would be useless to reiterate this truth, that the being dis- 

 covered by Laurillard at Nice, and described by Cuvier, is really 

 the detached arm of that species of Octopus which we call Trem- 

 octopus Carena, and that the individuals which carry these 

 deformed arms are always the males — smaller it is true than the 

 females — but for the rest organized in as complete a manner as 

 the other Cephalopoda. We have thought it superfluous to 



* The Entomostracous Crustacea, the Rotifera, and the Cirripedia, classes 

 which present instances of disproportion between the sexes quite as remarkable 

 as Kolliker supposed it to be in Argonauta, &c., seem to have been forgotten 

 by MM. Verany and Vogt. — TV. 



