86 



SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



care, seldom leaving them for an instant except to take 

 food, which, without a brief abandonment of her position, 

 would be beyond her reach. Aristotle asserted that while 

 the female is incubating she takes no food. This is 

 incorrect ; but in every case of the kind that has come 

 under my observation the mother octopod, whenever she 

 has been obliged to leave her nest, has returned to it as 

 quickly as possible ; and so I believe can, and does, the 

 female argonaut to her shell, and that, too, without any 

 difficulty. In her case the numerous clusters of eggs are all 

 united at their origin to one slender and tapering stalk 



>^' 



FIG. 29. — THE PAPER NAUTILUS {Argottauta argo) CRAWLING. 



which is fixed by a spot of glutinous matter to the body- 

 whorl of the spiral shell. 



This " paper-sailor," then, whom the poets have regarded 

 as endowed with so much grace and beauty, and living 

 in luxurious ease, is but a fine lady octopus after all. 

 Turn her out of her handsome residence, and, instead 

 of the fairy skimmer of the seas, you have before you an 

 object apparently as free from loveliness and romance as 

 her sprawling, uncanny-looking, relative. Instead of floating 

 in her pleasure boat over the surface of the sea, the 

 argonaut ordinarily crawls along the bottom, carrying her 

 shell above her, keel uppermost ; and the broad extremities 

 of the two arms are not hoisted as sails, nor allowed when 



