FAMILY 2. SIPHONOIDEA. 297 
seem to have been equally well known to the father of natural history ; 
for in Scaliger’s translation of the ‘ Historia Animalium’ we learn that 
Aristotle, when speaking of his Polypi, or Cephalopodous Malakia, makes 
especial mention of two of them having shells. They were both regarded 
by this venerable philosopher as species of Nautilus; “the one,” says 
Aristotle, ‘‘ has a hollow shell, not naturally adherent to it; the other 
has a shell, which like a snail it never quits.” Here, however, remained 
the history of these mollusks for ages. Pliny, and indeed other writers 
subsequent to Aristotle, seem only to have noticed one of the Nautili of 
their predecessor, for their observations embody little beyond what he 
had transmitted to them of his Nautilus primus, the light monothalomous 
Argonaut of Linneus. The Nautilus secundus of the ancients remained 
in obscurity until the revival of letters; Belon, a French author of 1550, 
gave a representation of the shell; and its animal inhabitant was figured 
in 1703 by Rumphius, a Dutch merchant and naturalist resident at Am- 
boyna. Although an accurate delineator of character for the age in which 
he lived, he was no anatomist, and his drawings are somewhat inaccurate ; 
having lost his sketches, he is said to have renewed them from recollec- 
tion ; they have, however, been valued from necessity, for no other living 
specimen of this mollusk was discovered for the lapse of a century and a 
quarter. 
Cuvier, the first great anatomist who tested the organism of the Ce- 
phalopods by minute dissection, looked with earnest solicitude, no doubt, 
for the soft and living portion of the Nautilus; but the act which made 
at last so prominent a step in the history of these animals, was reserved 
for a no less skilful operator of our own day. A Nautilus was captured 
in 1829 in the Bay of Marekini, at the Island of Erromango, New He- 
brides ; it was seen floating on the surface of the water, and was just 
about to sink, when a sailor caught hold of it with a boat-hook. The 
right eye was almost shattered in the struggle to secure it, and the shell 
being much broken it was injudiciously removed. ‘Two years unfortu- 
nately elapsed before the soft parts, which were carefully preserved in 
spirits, reached England: they were presented to Mr. Owen for dissec- 
tion ; and although a minute portion of shell, adhering to one of the lateral 
