CEPHALOPODA. 



)77 



What, then, were the nature and aflBnities of the extinct con- 

 structors of those ancient chambered siphoniferous shells ? Earnestly 

 and repeatedly had this question been pressed upon the attention of 

 zoologists and comparative anatomists, and long was it before any 

 satisfactory reply could be returned. The Nautilus Pompilms and 

 Spirula australis, the representatives in the existing seas of that 

 vast assemblage of siphoniferous Mollusks which peopled the ocean 

 during the secondary epochs, could alone yield the requisite data for 

 its determination, and for a long period comparative anatomists were 

 disappointed in their demands for these most rare and coveted sub- 

 jects. In fact, until the year 1832, geologists could be supplied only 

 with conclusions based upon more or less probable analogies and 

 conjectures. Before this period, only one account of the Nautilus 

 Pompilius was extant, in the work of Eumphius *, a Dutch naturalist 

 of the 17th century, whose figure of the animal was pronounced by 

 Cuvierf, the profoundest malacologist of his age, to be unintelligible 

 (* indechiffrable '). The little light that it might have thrown 

 upon the interesting question of the affinities of the Nautilus was ob- 

 scured by the grotesque, and, as they have since proved to be, ficti- 

 tious figures of the animal, subsequently published by De Montfort| 

 and Dr. Shaw §, and the evidence of Eumphius seems to have been 

 rejected by the naturalists of the French circumnavigatory expedition 

 under Captain Freycinet, who, on their return in 1831, published a 

 description and figures of part of an unknown molluscous animal, 

 presumed to be that of the Nautilus Pompilius\; and which, had 

 their conjecture been verified, would have indicated the chambered 

 shell of the Nautilus to have been an appendage to some huge 

 heteropod, allied to the Carinaria. 



If the claims of the Ammonite and its extinct congeners to take 

 rank in a higher class of Mollusca, had appeared to some zoologists 

 to be established by the figure of the animal of the Spirula, pub- 

 lished by Peron^, it might, at the period to which I allude, have 

 been objected that this evidence, likewise, had been invalidated by 

 Fremenville's assertion to Brongniart, cited by De Blanville**, that 

 the animal of the Spirula was wholly diflferent from Peron's descrip- 

 tion of it. 



If an appeal had been made from the unsatisfactory and conflicting 

 evidence derivable from the existing chambered siphoniferous shells 

 to the simple univalve of the Argonauta, which resembles them in its 



* CCCLXXXII. t XII. torn. iii. p. 18. + CCCLXXXIII. 



§ CCCLXXXIV. II CCCLXXXV. ^ CCCLXXXVI. 



** CCCXXVII. t. i. p. 381., Svo. 1825. Noavelles Annales du Museum, t. iiL 

 p. 20. 4to. 1834. 



P P 



