312 SUPPLEMENT 
published by direction of the council of the College of 
Surgeons. The reader will find the most satisfactory infor- 
mation on the subject, and the scientific public will earnestly 
hope that the present memoir will be the first of a similar 
series. 
The shell of this chambered nautilus (nautilus pompilius, 
L.), which is nearly eight inches in its highest part, is very 
common in the East Indian seas, and especially towards the 
Molucca islands. This is the one which was the subject of 
the observations of Rumphius, which we have cited a little 
farther back. It is usually brought into Europe in conse- 
quence of its fine mother-of-pearl, much in request with ca- 
binet-makers and jewellers. The smallest and most exca- 
vated partitions are used to make pendants for the ear. ' The 
orientals, by removing the stratum of this shell, which is not 
nacreous, form drinking-vessels of great brilliancy, on which 
they engrave divers figures. Formerly the same use was made 
of them in Europe, and such vessels were found only in the 
houses of great men and princes. At present they are chiefly 
confined to the cabinets of the curious. 
This SPIRULA is a true cephalopod, provided with a sac 
which envelopes the posterior part of the body. The anterior 
is external, and the head, which terminates it, supports ten 
arms, arranged like a crown around the mouth, two of which 
are longer than the others. M. de Lamarck adds, that at the 
posterior extremity of the sac is seen a shell encased, pre- 
senting externally only a single discovered portion of its last 
circumyvolution. It was even this resemblance of the animal 
of the spirula with the sepiz that first induced M. de Roissy, 
in his “ General History of the Mollusca,” and subsequently 
M. de Lamarck, to conclude, in a more rigorous manner than 
had been done before, that all the polythalamous shells had 
belonged to cephalopods. Unfortunately, the only individual 
which had served for observation to the zoologists now cited, 
ee ee 
