OCTOPODID. 17 
fire: these project about fourteen inches beyond the spear-haft, 
each piece having a barb on one side, and are arranged in a circle 
round the spear-end, and lashed firmly on with cedar-bark. 
Having spied out the Octopus, the hunter passes the spear care- 
fully through the water until within an inch or so of the centre 
disk, and then sends it in as deep as he can plunge it. Writhing 
with pain and passion, the Octopus coils its terrible arms round 
the haft; redskin, making the side of his canoe a fulcrum for his 
spear, keeps the struggling monster well off, and raises it to the 
surface of the water. It is dangerous now; if it could get a hold- 
fast on either savage or canoe, nothing short of chopping off the 
arms piecemeal would be of any avail. 
“ But the wily redskin knows all this, and has taken care to 
have another spear, unbarbed, long, straight, smooth, and very 
sharp, and with this he stabs the Octopus where the arms join 
the central disk. I suppose the spear must break down the 
nervous ganglions supplying motive power, as the stabbed arms 
lose at once strength and tenacity; the suckers, that a moment 
before held on with a force ten men could not have overcome, 
relax, and the entire ray hangs like a dead snake, a limp, lifeless 
mass. And thus the Indian stabs and stabs, until the Octopus, 
deprived of all power to do harm, is dragged into the canoe, a 
great, inert, quivering lump of brown-looking jelly.” 
Mrs. Lucie L. Hartt thus relates her experience with an 
Octopus : 
“Tt was during my first visit to Brazil, that one day, while 
busily engaged in examining a reef at a little town on the coast 
called Guarapary, my eye fell on an object in a shallow tide-pool, 
packed away in the crevice of the reef, which excited my curi- 
osity. I could see nothing but a pair of very bright eyes; but, 
concluding that the eyes had an owner, I determined very rashly 
to secure him. I had been handling corals, and seemed to have 
forgotten that all the inhabitants of the sea are not harmless. I 
put my hand down very quietly so as not to rutile the water, when, 
suddenly, to my surprise, it was seized with a pressure far too 
ardent to be agreeable, and I was held fast. I tugged hard to 
get away, but this uncivil individual, whoever he was, evidently 
had as strong a hold on the rocks as he had on my hand, and 
was not easily to be persuaded to let go of either. At last, 
however, he became convinced that he must choose between us, 
and so let go his hold upon the rocks, and I found clinging to 
my right hand, by his long arms, a large octopod cuttle-fish, and 
I began to suspect that I had caught a Tartar. His long arms 
were wound around my hand, and these arms, by the way, were 
covered with rows of suckers, somewhat like those with which 
boys lift stones, and escape from them was almost impossible. I 
