SEPTAD.E. — CUTTLE. 167 



young Poiilps are caught with a line weighted with lead, 

 furnished with a cork fitted with several hooks, covered 

 with pieces of scarlet cloth, twisted into thongs. He 

 adds, that the largest Poiilp he ever saw was about three 

 yards long, and weighed nearly half a hundredweight. 

 Poiilps of thirty pounds weight are not rare at Nice, and 

 those of twenty pounds are common.* In the Poly- 

 nesian islands, the natives have a curious contrivance for 

 catching cuttle-fish. It consists of a straight piece of hard 

 wood, a foot long, round and polished, and not half an inch 

 in diameter. Near one end of it, a number of beautiful 

 pieces of the cowrie, or tiger-shell, are fastened one over 

 another, like the scales of a fish, until it is nearly the 

 size of a turkey's egg, and resembles the cowrie. It is 

 suspended in a horizontal position by a strong line, and 

 lowered by the fisherman from a small canoe, till it 

 nearly reaches the bottom. The fisherman jerks the 

 line to cause the shell to move, as if it were alive, and 

 the jerking motion is called tootoofe, the name of the 

 contrivance. The cuttle-fish, attracted by the cowries, 

 darts out one of its arms, and then another, and so on, 

 until it is quite fastened among the openings between 

 the pieces of the cowrie, when it is drawn up into the 

 canoe and secured. 



Octopus vulgaris is rare on the British coast. I re- 

 collect that, about fifteen or sixteen years ago, one was 

 found on the shore at Beachy Head, by two fishermen, 

 who put it into a large bucket or tub, and took it round 

 to most of the houses at Eastbourne for exhibition ; and 

 Mr. Gosse found one in 1860 on the beach at Babbi- 

 combe. Dr. Spence, of Lerwick, in 1862, sent an ac- 

 count to Dr. All man, Professor of Natural History at 



* See notes in ' Life in Normandy,' vol. i. pp. 293, 298.— D.D. 



