NEW LIMBS FOR OLD ONES. 51 



they are legs, the octopus can hold on with them as tightly as the 

 *' old man of the sea " gripped Sinbad the Sailor, and use them 

 as dexterously as the "armless girl," who cuts out with hers 

 the pretty paper designs which she sells to visitors. If they 

 are arms, he can walk on them, head downwards, under water, 

 more cleverly than the most agile monkey or street arab. So we 

 may call them either or both. 



Returning to our mutilated octopus ; — we transfer him from the 

 tank in which he had been temporarily placed to the wet pave- 

 ment, that we may better observe his movements when crawling. 

 He scrambles and shuffles away, and makes the best use he can of 

 the jury-rigging he has fitted on to his old stumps. As he does 

 so, his keen eyes, mounted on little hillocks, peer furtively around 

 him j and while he sidles off from his too admiring persecutors, he 

 casts a doubtful, half-frightened, half-defiant glance behind him, 

 like a schoolboy, timid in the dark, who fancies a ghost is fol- 

 lowing him. His cousin the cuttle-fish {Sepia) has an eye, round 

 like that of an owl, which stares you out of countenance, and 

 puzzles you by its immobility ; the pupil of the eye of an octopus 

 is like that of a tiger turned half round. The perpendicularly- 

 elongated pupil of the cat gleams with hot ferocity: the calm, 

 cunning gaze of the octopus from out the narrow horizontal slit of 

 its compressed eyelids freezes by its cold cruelty. 



Now, let us try to conjecture the ^^ fans et origo viali^'' — the 

 source of the injury of the two lopped arms. 



There lingers still amongst the fishermen of the Mediterranean 

 a very ancient belief that the octopus when pushed by hunger will 

 gnaw and devour portions of its arms. Aristotle knew of it, and 

 positively contradicted it ; but a fallacy once planted is hard to 

 eradicate. You may cut it down, and apparently destroy it, root 

 and branch, but its seeds are scattered abroad, and spring up else- 

 where and in unexpected places. Accordingly we find Oppian, 

 more than five centuries later, disseminating the same old notion, 

 and comparing this habit of the animal with that of the bear 



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