92 SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



and Solomon Islands. It has also been found alive on 

 Pemba Island, near Zanzibar. It seems strange, therefore, 

 that until about half a centuiy ago hardly anything was 

 known of the animal that secretes and inhabits it. Rum- 

 phius, a Dutch naturalist, in his ' Rarities of Amboyna,' 

 published, in 1705, a description of one with an engraving, 

 incorrect in drawing, and deficient in detail ; and until 1832 

 tliis was the only information which existed concerning it. 

 The great Cuvier never saw one, and being acquainted only 

 with the two-gilled cephalopods, he regarded the head- 

 footed mollusks as absolutely isolated from all other 

 animals in the kingdom of nature, even from the other 

 classes of the mollusca. It seemed, however, to Professor 

 Owen, then only nineteen years of age, that in the only 

 living representative of the four-gilled order. Nautilus 

 povipiliuSy might be found the "missing link." When, 

 therefore, in the year 1824, his fellow-student, Mr. George 

 Bennett, was about to sail from England to the Polynesian 

 Islands, young Richard Owen earnestly charged his friend 

 to do his utmost to obtain, and bring home in alcohol, a 

 specimen of the much-coveted Pearly Nautilus. The 

 opportunity did not occur till one warm and calm Monday 

 evening, the 24th of August, 1829, when a living Nautilus 

 was seen at the surface of the water not far distant from 

 the ship, in Marekini Bay, on the south-west coast of the 

 Island of Erromango, New Hebrides, in the South Pacific 

 Ocean. It looked like a dead tortoise-shell cat, as the 

 sailors said. As it began to sink as soon as it was 

 observed, it was struck at with a boat-hook, and was thus 

 so much injured that it died shortly after being taken on 

 board the ship. The shell was destroyed, but the soft 

 body of the animal was preserved in spirits, and great was 

 the joy of Mr. Owen when, in July, 1 831, Mr. Bennett 



