474 THE OCEAN WORLD. 
creatures, and I have lived with them in a world of gentle pedce.. 
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 (Sepza). 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 
“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 Maadma of Aris- 
totle, AZoliia of Pliny, and Cephalophora of De Blainville, have the 
