THE CEPHALOPODS THEIR MOTIONS. 119 



of unstable water around them ? They are created to live, and 

 are born amidst the fields of sea-weed, which voyagers de- 

 scribe with amazement, as covering- leagues of sea within the 

 Tropics ; and to enable them to attach themselves to the 

 narrow leaves of the sargassum, they are furnished by their 

 Creator with a small sucker, which, like a cupping-glass 

 applied against the surface of the leaf, suspends them there 

 without exertion. If such wonderful adaptations — such 

 alliances between things which seem most remote — such 

 design in such apparent chance, do not warm you with a 

 conviction of the presence of an Omniscience, whose eye 

 is over all his works, you are made of an earthier soul than 

 I am well persuaded you are, and are most unfit for a 

 naturalist. The little sucking pouch is situated on the 

 superior and posterior margin of the ventral fin, and is 

 formed by a kind of duplicature of the membrane which 

 covers that organ.* 



The presence of a sucker in these molluscans reminds me 

 of the cotyligerous Cephalopods, of which it has been as- 

 serted that the species, having two long arms in addition to 

 the shorter feet (Decapods), anchor themselves to the sub- 

 marine rocks when they cannot otherwise withstand the 

 agitation of a stormy sea;-j- although, in general, the suckers 

 are rather to them organs of prehension to arrest their prey 

 than organs of rest. All the Cephalopods are good swim- 

 mers ; bat, in their mode of natation, they are as peculiar as 

 they are in appearance and character, for their movements 

 are retrograde, while the head is directed downwards and 

 backwards, and the body held nearly in a perpendicular 

 position. The majority of the Decapods have a muscular fin 

 on each side, by whose aid they accomplish their movements 

 in this apparently inconvenient posture, moving with great 

 vivacity by sudden and irregular jerks. Pliny says, that the 

 Loligines can fly, J and the term is in truth as applicable to 



* Rang. Man. pp. 26—28, and 120. 



t Rondel. Hist, des Poiss. i. 366. 



% Holland's Pliny, i. 250. Dr. Gould says of Loligo illecebrosa, — 

 "So swift and straight is their progress that they look like arrows shooting 

 through the water." — Invert. Massachus. 318. 



" The action of the powerful muscles in the terminal fins of the Cala- 

 maries must be aided in its effect upon the body by the elasticity of the 

 internal pen or gladius. By these means they are enabled not only to 

 propel themselves forward in the sea, but they can strike the surface of the 

 water with such force as to raise themselves above it, and dart like the 

 flying-fish for a short distance through the air. This is the highest act of 

 locomotion, the nearest approach to flight, which any of the molluscous 

 animals have presented." — Owen's Lcct. Invert. Anim, 348. 



