CEPHALOPODA. 125 



teeth, remarks : — " It must, then, be a fearful thing for 

 any living creature to come within their compass ; for, 

 entangled in the slimy serpentine grasp of eight or ten 

 arms, and held by the pressure of some hundreds of 

 exhausted cups, escape is hopeless ; and the struggles 

 of the hapless victim, by bringing its body into more 

 rapid contact with the suckers not yet applied, only 

 accelerate its fate.^^ The Cephalopods subsist on fishes, 

 moUusca, and Crustacea. Although they are mostly 

 zoophagous, as well as ferocious, Johnston observed that 

 Ommatostrephes todarus was phytophagous also. They 

 ai-e a favoui'ite food of fishes, and make the best bait ; 

 gulls and other sea-fowl prey on them;- and in the 

 Mediterranean, from Homeric times, man has esteemed 

 them as delicacies. Aristotle states that when in spawn 

 they are better eating. They usually swim backwards 

 by the action of the ventral muscles, the water taken in 

 at the open part of the mantle-sac being ejected through 

 the funnel in a continuous stream, and causing a repel- 

 lent motion. The members of the Loligo family, how- 

 ever, use their fins and swim forwards. Sailors have 

 given some of them the name of " flying squids,^^ from 

 their habit of leaping out of the water, often to such a 

 height as to fall on the decks of vessels ; whether their 

 fins serve the purpose of wings may be doubted. They 

 crawl by means of the foot-lobes or arms, and seize their 

 prey with the tentacles, by which they also moor them- 

 selves when at rest. Barbut compares the noise made 

 by a cuttlefish, on being dragged out of the water, 

 to the grunting of a hog. The sudden changes of 

 colour and the pigment-spots or chromatophores (which 

 latter were at one time supposed to shift their places, 

 but are now known to be merely extensile and com- 

 pressible at the will of the animal) were first noticed by 



