CEPHALOPODS. 



495 



rudder, the house, the ship, and the animal. If danger approaches, 

 it folds up its antennae, its sail, and its rudder, and dives, its weight 

 being increased by the water which it causes to enter the shell. As 

 we see a man who is victor in the public games, his head circled by 

 a crown, while vast crowds press around, so the Pompylius have 

 always a crowd of ships following in their track, the crews of which 

 no longer dread to quit the land. O fish justly dear to navigators ! 

 thy presence announces winds soft and friendly : thou bnngest the 

 calm, and thou art the sign of it ! " 



Fig. 335. Shell of Argonauta argo (Linnaeus). 



Oppian carried his admiration a long way. That the Argonaut is 

 an animated skiff is agreed on all hands ; but, in making it almost a 

 bird in according to it at once the faculty of gracefully navigating the 

 sea and floating in the atmosphere as an inhabitant of the regions of 

 air he was passing even the limits permissible to poetic license. 



But the properties of the Argonaut have not alone struck the ima- 

 gination of the Greeks and Romans ; they also attracted the attention 

 of the Chinese, who call it the boat-polyp. Rumphius informs us, that 

 in India the shell (Fig. 335) fetches a great price. Women consider 

 it a great, a magnificent ornament. In their solemn fetes, dancers 

 carry one of these shells in the right hand, holding it proudly above 



