.1837.] 



Fossil Remains of the Cuttle Fish. 



403 



Fossil Remai7is of naked Mollusks, Pens, and Ink- Bags of Loligo, 

 — It is well known that the common Cuttle Fish, and other living species 

 of Cepualopods,* which have no external shell, are protected from their 

 enemies by a peculiar internal provision, consisting of a bladder-shaped 

 sac, containing a black and viscid ink, the ejection of which defends 

 them, by rendering opaque the water in which they thus become con* 

 cealed. The most familiar examples of this contrivance are found in 

 the Sepia vulgaris, and Loligo of our own seas. 



It was hardly to be expected that we should find, amid the petrified 

 remains of animals of the ancient world (remains which have been 

 buried for countless centuries in the deep foundations of the earth), 

 traces of so delicate a fluid as the ink which was contained within the 

 bodies of extinct species of Cephalopods, that perished at periods so 

 incalculably remote; yet the preservation of this substance is establish- 

 ed beyond the possibility of doubt, by the recent discovery of numerous 

 specimens in the Lias of Lyme Regis, t in which the ink-bags are pre- 

 served in a fossil state, still distended, as when they formed parts of the 

 organization of living bodies, and retaining the same jux-taposition to 

 a horny pen, which the ink-bag of the existing Loligo bears to the pen 

 within the body of that animal. 



Having before us the fact of the preservation of this fossil -ink, we find 

 a ready explanation of it, in the indestructible nature of the carbon of 

 which it was chiefly coniposed. Cuvier describes the ink of the recent 

 Cuttle Fish as being a dense fluid of the consistence of pap " bouillie," 

 suspended in the cells of a thin net-work that pervades the interior of 

 the ink-bag ; it very much resembles common printers' ink. A sub- 

 stance of this nature would readily be transferred to a fossil state, 

 without much diminution of its bulk.J 



* The figure of the common Calmar, or Squid (Loligo Vulgaris Lam. — Sepia loligo of 

 Linnaeus), illustrates the origin of the term Cephalopod, a term applied to a large fami- 

 ly of molluscous animals, frum the fact of their feet being placed around their heads. 

 The feet are lined internally with ranges of horny cups, or suckers, by which the animal 

 seizes on its prey, and adheres to extraneous bodies. The mouth, in form and substance 

 resembles a Parrot's beak, and is surrounded by the feet. By means of these feet and 

 suckers the Sepia octopus, or common Poulpe (the Polypus of the ancients;, crawls with 

 its head downwards, along the bottom of the sea. 



+ We owe this discovery to the industry and skill of Miss Mary Aiming, to whom th? 

 scientific world is largely indebted, for having brought to light so many interesting re- 

 mains of fossil Reptiles from the Lias at Lyme Regis. 



% So completely are the character and qualities of the ink retained in its fossil state, 

 that when, in 1826, I submitted a portion of it to my friend Sir Francis Chantrey, re- 

 questing him to try its power as a pigment, and he had prepared a dtawing with a tritu- 

 rated, portion of this fossil substance; the drawing was shown to a celebrated painter, 

 without any information as to its origin, and ho immediately pronouncod it to be tinted 



