THE CEPHALOPODS. 253 
between the poulpes and the calmars, or shall we suppose that its 
two long arms had been dragged off in an encounter? As it is 
impossible to settle the question, the naturalists MM. Crosse 
and Fischer propose to catalogue this monster in a class by itself, 
under the. name of the Calmar of Bouyer. 
As with the mollusks, so with the cephalopods—some have 
shells and some are naked. We have seen that the greater 
number of the acephala and cephala are ensconced in shells; but 
the reverse is the case with the cephalopods. Most of them are 
without any calcareous covering, and only two species are 
testaceous; these are the Argonauts and the Nauti. 
The argonauts have an historical fame. Many a famous 
pen has been engaged in their description, and many a poet has 
celebrated them in his verse. The Romans and the Greeks 
looked upon the argonauts as tutelar deities, who guided the 
mariner across the trackless deep, and bespoke for him a calm 
and peaceful voyage. Aristotle called the argonaut the nautilus. 
Pliny gave to it the name of Pompilius. 
The most prominent features of the animal are its eight ten- 
tacles; six of these are very long, tapering to points, and are 
furnished with two rows of suckers. The remaining two are the 
great characteristic of the cephalopods; they expand themselves 
out into fan-like membranes, which the creature hoists as sails, 
and gracefully glides before the gentle zephyrs on the sparkling 
surface of the calm sea. The shell is very thin and fragile; it 
is a spiral, but the last turn is peculiarly large. The exterior of 
the shell is deeply grooved, the channels converging from the 
edges to the centre of the spiral. Its whole appearance has a 
graceful elegance, and has often been likened to a beautiful shallop, 
the sharp curve of the spiral serving as the prow. 
Perhaps not one of the least characteristic features of this 
curious animal is, that it is at no point attached to its shell. 
Knowing this, for a long time naturalists supposed that it was 
a parasite seizing upon the shell of another mollusk and appro- 
priating it, after the fashion of the hermit-crab. However, many 
have been captured, and never was an argonaut discovered in any 
other than its proper shell, and never was one found too large 
