OCTOPUS 



ODE 



577 



of the year to the first of January, though it 

 retained its original name, notwithstanding the 

 attempts made by the Roman senate, and the 

 emperors Commodus and Domitian, who sub- 

 stituted for a time the terms Faustinus, Invictus, 

 Domitianus. Many Roman and Greek festivals 

 fell to be celebrated in this month, the most 

 remarkable of which was the sacrifice at Rome of 

 the October horse to the god Mars. 



Or toplis. a widely distributed genus of eight- 

 armed cuttle-fishes, the niemliers of which (e.g. 0. 

 vulgaris in Europe, and 0. bairdii in America) 

 usually live near shore, lurking among the rocks, 

 preying upon crustaceans and molluscs. The term 

 is often extended to related genera, such as Eledone, 

 and to other members of the sub-order Octopoda. 

 These differ in many ways from the Decapoda, 

 such as Sepia and Loligo : thus, the suckers on the 

 eight arms are sessile and without "a, horny ring ; 

 the body is more rounded, and there is no inter- 

 nal residue of a shell. Of the half-hundred species 

 gome are large : thus, 0. vulgaris may have ten- 

 tacles about 8 feet long, and 0. punctatus of 

 the Pacific coasts even twice as much. These are 

 dwarfed, however, by the gigantic ten-armed Archi- 

 teuthis, of which one specimen exhibited in America 

 had a head and body !U feet long and arms of 

 30 feet, while another had a body twice as big. 



Common Octopus (Octoput vutijaru). 



Many fanciful descriptions have been "iven of the 

 Octopus, notably that by Victor lingo in his 

 Toilers of the Sea, in which the characters of 

 cephalopod and polyp are dramatically combined. 

 Large specimens may of course act powerfully on 

 the defensive, but by nature they are timid, lurking 

 animals, the conger eel and other voracious fishes 

 being their most formidable foes. They an- some 

 times caught in sunken pots, into which they neep, 

 and the flesh is used both as food and bait. The 

 predominant colour is reddish, but it changes 

 rapidly with that of the surroundings and with 

 the temper of the animal, which has also the 

 power of discolouring the watrr by a discharge of 

 inky fluid. The eggs are enclosed in small trans- 

 lucent sacs, and hundreds are attached to a com- 

 mon stalk which is glued to the rock, and pro- 

 tected and kept free of small seaweeds, &r., by the 

 female. For their general structure, see CEPHALO- 

 PODA, CALAMARY, and CI-TTLK-FISH. 



Octroi (Lat. auctoritas, 'authority'), a term 

 wuich originally meant any ordinance authorised 

 349 



by the sovereign, and thence came to be restric- 

 tively applied to a toll or tax in kind levied from 

 a very early period in France and other countries 

 of northern Europe on articles of food which passed 

 the barrier or entrance of a town. The octroi was 

 abolished in France at the Revolution, but in 1798 

 it was re-established. The octroi officers are 

 entitled to search all carriages and individuals 

 entering the gates of a town. Similar taxes are 

 raised in Italy and elsewhere. 



O'Curry, EUGENE ( 1796-1862), Irish antiquary. 

 See IRELAND, Vol. VI. p. 209. 



Od, the name given by Baron Reichenbach 

 (q.v.) to a peculiar physical force which he thought 

 lie had discovered, intermediate between electricity, 

 magnetism, warmth, and light. This force, accord- 

 ing to him, pervades all nature, and manifests it-elf 

 as a flickering flame or luminous appearance at the 

 poles of magnets, at the poles of crystals, and 

 wherever chemical action is going on. All motion 

 generates od ; and all the phenomena of mesmerism 

 are ascribed to the workings of this od-force. See 

 Buchner, Das Od (1854); Fechner, Erinnerutigeii 

 itn die letzten Tuije des Odlehre (1876); and the 

 Transactions at the Psychical Research Soc. (1883). 



Odal. See ALLODITM. 



OddiVHows. See FRIENDLY SOCIETIES. 



Ode (Gr. ode, from aeido, 'I sing'), a form of 

 lyrical poetry associated in its supreme form with 

 tlie name of Pindar, but practised with splendid 

 success by many English port-. The Greek ode 

 was simply a chant or poem arranged to be sung 

 to an instrumental accompaniment, and all the 

 variations of form that occurred were merely 

 subjective, incapable of imitation, and conditioned 

 only by the exigencies of the music. Archi- 

 lochus was the first to expand the simple di-tii-h 

 into an e/tiide ; Alcman, to adopt the more com- 

 plex form of the rumen or ode. Sappho, Alcn'us, 

 and Anacreon carried it further, and shaped 

 the lighter form of ode known to us, through 

 the masterpieces of their greatest imitator, as the 

 Horatian. Stesiehorus modified the ode of Alcman 

 by elaliorating a triple movement, in which the 

 metrical wave moving in the strophe was answered 

 by the counter wave moving in the nntixtropJie, 

 the whole concluded by the e/>o<le, a blended echo 

 of the two. Simonides adapted this elaborate 

 form to Dorian music, and next followed Pindar, 

 the greatest master of the ode. His Parthnn'i <\\ 

 odes for virgins, his Shiliu or dithyrambic odes in 

 praise of Dionysus, and his encomiastic odes have 

 all perished ; only his Kpitiikia, or triumphal odes, 

 remain. These display an infinite variety of metri- 

 cal ingenuity ; no two odes have the same metrical 

 structure, yet each olieys a definite structural law, 

 and license there is none in its irregularity. The 

 Humanist poets imitated the simpler yEtolian 

 measures as they found them in Catullus and 

 Horace ; but many of our poets, taking Pindaric as 

 synonymous with irregular, produced so-called odes 

 whose only likeness to their great original was 

 their 'unshackled numliers.' But irregularity in 

 verse is not allowable except in cases where it is a 

 natural aid grasped by the poetic mood in its 

 moment of exaltation : for the. most constant charm 

 of poetry is the inevitableness of cadence, which 

 must never be lightly flung away unless to sub- 

 serve another and still higher law that of emotional 

 ty. It is only in the hands of a master that 

 the ode may safely he imitated in English ; by all 

 others the apparent artifice of the form and the 

 neccss/ii-y spontaneity of the impulse may not be 

 reconciled. 



Ben Jonson's odes are unequal ; Herrick's, poor ; 

 Spenser's Epithalaminm, or marriage ode, is one of 

 the most splendid triumphs of English poetry ; and 



