HIGHER LIFE IN WATERS, 



S7 



fishes is the octopus, or devil-fish proper. This animal 

 consists of a mouth and stomach combined, with usually 

 eight, but sometimes ten long arms. The eyes are like 

 those of the cuttle-fish. It can readily be seen how this 

 creature seizes its prey. The arms are tough and leathery, 

 and can not be easily cut with a knife. They are furnished 

 their whole length with two rows of perfect sucking disks, 

 or some two thousand air-pumps. The edges arc sharp 

 and saw-like, burying themselves in the flesh of their vic- 

 tims. With some of their arms attached to a rock, they 

 throw out the oth- 

 ers as lassos, and 

 while in this posi- 

 tion scarcely any- 

 thing can resist their 

 force. 



4. The long ap- 

 pendages are used 

 both as arms and 

 legs. All the octo- 

 pods swim freely at 

 will, and associate 

 in numbers, but the 

 larger ones, as they 

 become older, fly 

 from community life and retire into the clefts and hol- 

 lows of the rocks which have been worn by the waves, gen- 

 erally in places only a few feet below the level of low water. 

 There, with one arm clasped close to the wall of its dwell- 

 ings the watchful savasje extends the others, alert, like the 

 boa-constrictor, for the approach of prey, and no less dead- 

 ly in the crushing force of its folds. Its movements in 

 seizing its victims are swift as an arrow. 



5. When the animal is swimming, its long tentacles 

 would be in the way if extended or left pendent, so they 



The Octopus. 



