i8 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



a methodical description of the general form, tells us of 

 the body and fins, of the eight arms with their rows of 

 suckers, of the abnormal position of the head. He points 

 out the two long arms of Sepia and of the Calamaries, 

 and their absence in the octopus ; and he tells us, what 

 was only confirmed of late, that with these two long arms 

 the creature clings to the rock and sways about like a ship 

 at anchor. He describes the great eyes, the two big teeth 

 forming the beak ; and he dissects the whole structure 

 of the gut, with its long gullet, its round crop, its stomach 

 and the little coiled caecal diverticulum ; dissecting not 

 only one but several species, and noting differences that 

 -, were not observed again till Cuvier re-dissected them. 

 He describes the funnel and its relation to the mantle-sac, 

 and the ink-bag, which he shows to be largest in Sepia of 

 all others. And here, by the way, he seems to make one 

 of those apparent errors that, as it happens, turn out 

 to be justified : for he tells us that in Octopus the funnel 

 is on the upper side ; the fact being that when the 

 creature lies prone upon the ground, with all its arms 

 spread and flattened out, the funnel-tube (instead of 

 being flattened out beneath the creature's prostrate body) 

 is long enough to protrude upwards between arms and 

 head, and to appear on one side or other thereof, in a 

 position apparently the reverse of its natural one. He 

 describes the character of the cuttle-bone in Sepia, and 

 of the horny pen which takes its place in the various 

 Calamaries, and notes the lack of any similar structure in 

 Octopus. He dissects in both sexes the reproductive 

 organs, noting without exception all their essential and 

 complicated parts ; and he had figured these in his lost 

 volume of anatomical diagrams. He describes the various 

 kinds of eggs, and, with still more surprising knowledge, 

 shows us the little embryo cuttle-fish, with its great 



