474 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



creatures, and I have lived with them in a world of gentle peace. 

 Few flesh-eaters among them ; those even which are so, only kill to 

 satisfy their wants, living for the most part on life just commenced 

 on gelatinous animals which can scarcely be called organic. From 

 this world grief was absent. No cruelty and no passion. Their 

 little souls, if mild, were not without their ray of aspiration towards 

 the light, and towards what comes to us from heaven, and towards 

 that love, revelling in that changing flame which at night is the 

 light of the deep. It is now, however, necessary to describe a much 

 graver world : a world of rapine and of murder ; from the very 

 beginning, from the first appearance of life, violent death appeared ; 

 sudden refinement, useful but cruel purification of all which has 

 languished, or which may linger or languish, of the slow and feeble 

 creation whose fecundity had encumbered the globe. 



" In the more ancient formations of the old world we find two 

 murderers a nipper and a sucker. The first is revealed to us by 

 the imprint of the trilobite, an order now lost, the most destructive of 

 extinct beings. The second subsists in one gigantic fragment, a beak 

 nearly two feet in length, which was that of a great sucker or cuttle- 

 fish (Sepia). If we may judge from such a beak, this monster if the 

 other parts of the body were in proportion must have been enormous ; 

 its ventose, invincible arms, of perhaps twenty or thirty feet, like those 

 of some monstrous spider. In making war on the molluscs he remains 

 mollusc also ; that is to say, always an embryo. He presents the 

 strange, almost ridiculous, if it was not also terrible, appearance of 

 an embryo going to war ; of a foetus furious and cruel, soft and trans- 

 parent, but tenacious, breathing with a murderous breath, for it is not 

 for food alone that it makes war : it has the wish to destroy. Satiated, 

 and even bursting, it still destroys. Without defensive armour, under 

 its threatening murmurs there is no peace ; its safety is to attack. It 

 regards all creatures as a possible enemy. It throws about its long 

 arms, or rather thongs, armed with suckers, at random." Such is the 

 somewhat exaggerated picture which the eloquent historian and poet 

 draws of the Molluscous Cephalopod, and perhaps it must be 

 admitted that there is some little basis of truth in this, though there 

 is scarcely any in the more recent one which has been painted by 

 the more imaginative Victor Hugo, in his eloquent book, entitled 

 4< Les Travailleurs de la Mer." Where, however, there is so much 

 of the fictitious, it will be our earnest endeavour to eliminate 

 facts only. 



These formidable and curious Cephalopods, the MaAata of Aris- 

 totle, Mollia of Pliny, and Cephalophora of De Blaiuville, have the 



