DOUBLE JUSTICE. 109 



1839, the lady put the cap of completeness on her labours, by 

 forwarding to the principal learned societies of Europe sets of 

 specimens of the Argonaut and its shell of all sizes ; hoping, no 

 doubt, to teach the disputatious philosophers how much better 

 than theory or argument is a little patient watching and pains- 

 taking examination of actual facts. 



It was enough for a kdy to do, to clear the character of the 

 Argonaut, and to establish its title to the shell in which it had 

 won such renown as a navigator. It would have been an 

 unseemly thing for those fair hands to have stripped the little 

 Cephalopod of its laurels ; and Madame Power was content to 

 believe with the rest of mankind, that, far out at sea, as the poet 

 sang, the Argonaut 



" Put out a tier of oars on either side, 

 Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail, 

 And mounted up and glided down the billow 

 In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air, 

 And wander in the luxury of light." 



But there was double justice to be done. The Argonaut had 

 been proved innocent of piracy, and now, by the same stern rule 

 of right, it was to lose its reputation as a sailor. 



Nearly at the same time as Madame Power was attending to 

 her little proteges in the Bay of Messina, M. Sander Piang was 

 carrying on a somewhat similar course of observations on the 

 opposite shores of the Mediterranean at Algiers. The researches 

 of this gentleman are entirely corroborative of those of Madame 

 Power as to the secretion of the shell by the so-called sails ; but 

 they go further, and show, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the 

 Argonaut has no such power, as is commonly supposed, of 

 hoisting these expanded membranes to " catch the driving gale," 

 and so to sail along the deep. The little Cephalopod can 

 certainly raise itself from below, and sport about at the surface 

 of the water, but it does this with its membraneous flaps closely 

 wrapped about its shell, and by precisely the same means as the 

 Cephalopods in general namely, by the forcible ejection of 

 water from the funnel. M. Rang, therefore, completely upsets 

 the Argonaut's reputation as a sailor ; but, then, he makes him 

 known to us in a new character that of a crawler at the sea- 

 bottom, where, it appears, the animal creeps along with its head 



