MOLLUSCS. 115 



This lack of connection between the animal and the shell led to many 

 disputes in olden times. One party claimed that the shell was really the 

 product of the animal found with it ; the other, that the animal was but 

 the occupant of a shell formed by some unknown mollusc. In the older 

 works the paper-sailor was pictured and described as floating in its shell, 

 like a man in a boat, over the surface of the waves, and holding up two 

 of its broad and flattened arms like sails to catch the favoring breezes. It 

 turns out, however, that there is more poetry than truth in the story, and 

 that these arms, instead of being sails, are really specialized for the build- 

 ing of the shell. The paper-sailors are all inhabitants of the warmer seas, 

 but they are occasionally drifted by the winds to the colder shores. 



The Octopus is possibly the best-known, certainly the most maligned, of 

 all the molluscs. It has served as the basis of many a weird and horrible 

 tale, but nowhere has more injustice been done it than in the oft-quoted, 

 oft-refuted description of the devil-fish in Victor Hugo's { Toilers of the 

 Sea.' Every one is familiar with his horrible monster, and the perfectly 

 devilish way in which he closed upon and killed his victim, and yet no 

 such animal as the novelist describes exists. There is a famous passage 

 in l Pickwick ' describing the way in which an article on Chinese meta- 

 physics was composed ; the author consulted the encyclopaedia for ' China ' 

 and for ' metaphysics,' and then combined the two. The French author 

 confused the terms polyp (a term for Ccelenterate animals) and poulpe 

 (the Octojnis) ; read the descriptions of each in the encyclopaedia, then 

 turned to the ' devil-fish,' one of the skates, and stole its name Cepkaloptera 

 for his new nondescript ; and then, after adding certain other features 

 evolved from his own inner consciousness, the whole account was launched 

 to curdle the blood of the reader. 



Still the Octoims has its own faults, and large specimens are disagree- 

 able to meet under certain circumstances. In appearance they are far 

 from prepossessing, as may be seen from the adjacent plate. Mrs. Hartt 

 has told her adventure with one in the following graphic language : — 



"It was during my first visit to Brazil, that one day, while busily 

 engaged in examining a reef at a little town on the coast called Quarapary, 

 my eye fell on an object in a shallow tide-pool, packed away in a crevice 

 in the reef which excited my curiosity. I could see nothing but a pair of 

 very bright eyes ; but concluding that the eyes had an owner, I determined 

 very rashly to secure him. I had been handling corals and seemed to have 

 forgotten that all the inhabitants of the sea are not harmless. I put down 

 my hand very quietly so as not to ruffle the water, when suddenly, to my 

 surprise, it was seized with a pressure far too ardent to be agreeable, and 

 I was held fast. I tugged hard to get away ; but this uncivil individual, 



