Animals with more than Two Eyes. 205 
These eyes were afterwards said to have been transferred 
to the tail feathers of Juno’s favourite bird, the peacock, 
and people sometimes pretend to see the traces of them in the 
peacock tails of to-day. 
We do mean real animals and real eyes. And the extra eyes 
in the living creatures are no mere casual occurrences ; they are 
not “freaks of nature,” such as the accidental malformations 
we sometimes see preserved in museums, or shown in popular 
exhibitions. 
The myriad-eyed animals are neither myths nor monsters. 
They are examples of the beautiful and symmetrical in nature, 
and not of the uncommon and repulsive. They live in our 
world of to-day, fellow-tenants of the beautiful earth, peopling the 
air, the dry land, and the seas. They are marvellous, yet 
multifarious members of the zodlogical cosmos, the fearfully and 
wonderfully made animal world. 
There are many-eyed animals both of the sea and of the 
land. They vary greatly in size, from the little fairy fly, the 
fiftieth part of an inch in length, to reptiles measuring nearly 
eighty feet. 
Strange to say, not all these curious animals have their eyes 
on their heads. Indeed, many of them have no heads, and yet 
they have hundreds of eyes. Others have eyes on their backs 
as well as upon their heads. Some kinds of shell-fish have 
thousands of eyes, and these are situated, not on the animal’s 
body, but on its hard, stony shell! 
Again, many of these multitudinous eyes are very curiously 
shaped. It will surprise you to learn through what wonderful 
windows with variously shaped panes and minute partitions these 
many-eyed animals look out upon the wide world around them. 
Let us begin with the humbler forms of life. We will take the 
scalloped family as an example. We all know the scallop shell. 
It has become historical, used as it was as a drinking cup by the 
pilgrims to the Holy Land in the time of the Crusaders. We 
see the scallop in the fishmongers’ shops, but how many of us 
know anything about the curious animal within! The creature is 
absolutely without a head, and yet it is possessed of nearly one 
hundred eyes. 
Lift up the double-edged fleshy “ mantle” or envelope which 
forms the outer covering, and you will find the inner one drooping 
like a curtain finely fringed. At its base you will see a row of 
conspicuous black dots, surrounded by tentacles. These are the 
animal’s eyes, which you may count by scores. These eyes have 
been very carefully examined by zoodlogists. They are somewhat 
rudimentary in structure, when compared with the eyes of man ; 
but they possess a “cornea” or transparent membrane in front of 
