CEPHALOPODS. 495 
rudder, the house, the ship, and the animal. If danger approaches, 
it folds up its antenne, 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 bringest the 
1? 
calm, and thou art the sign of it! 
al | 
f'// 
i | 
i ri if ¢ h 
f Leh 
Fig. 335.—Shell of Argonauta argo (Linnzus). 
as 
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 fétes, dancers 
carry one of these shells in the right hand, holding it proudly above 
