440 
THE OCEAN WORLD. 
creatures, and I have lived with them in a woi-ld of gentle peace. i'' e ' v 
flesh-eaters among them ; those even which are so, only kill to satisfy the 11 
wants, living for the most part on life just commenced — on gelatinous 
animals, which can scarcely he called organic. From this world gr^ 
was absent. No cruelty and no passion. Their little souls, if mild’ 
were not without their ray of aspiration towards the light, and toward 
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, ho^" 
ever, necessary to describe a much graver world : a world of rapine an^ 
of murder ; from the very beginning, from the first appearance of fif e > 
violent death appeared ; sudden refinement, useful but cruel, purification 
of all which has languished, or which may linger or languish, of fb e 
slow and feeble creation whose fecundity had encumbered the globe. 
“ In the more ancient formations of the old world we find two nW r ' 
derous beasts — an eater and a sucker. The first is revealed to us by 
the imprint of the trilobite, a species now lost, the most destructive 
of 
extinct beings. The second subsists in one fearful fragment, a be^ 1 
nearly two feet in length, which was that of a great sucker or cuttle* 
fish (Sepia). If we may judge from such a heak, this monster, if tb e 
other parts of the body are in proportion, must have been enormous , 
its ventosc, invincible arms, of perhaps twenty or thirty feet, like th° s ® 
of some monstrous spider. The sucker of the world, soft and gelatinous ■ 
it is himself. In making war on the molluscs he remains inoll uSL 
also; that is to say, always an embryo. He presents the strange 
almost ridiculous, if it was not also terrible, appearance of an embrj 0 
going to war ; of a foetus furious and cruel, soft and transparent, buf 
tenacious, breathing with a murderous breath, for it is not for f°° ( 
alone that it makes war : it has the wish to destroy. Satiated, 
even bursting, it still destroys. Without defensive armour, under lt3 
threatening murmurs there is no peace ; its safety is to attack. 
It 
regards all creatures as a possible enemy. It throws about its 1 0I1 § 
arms, or rather thongs, armed with suckers, at random.” Such is tb® 
somewhat exaggerated picture which the eloquent historian and P° e 
draws of the Molluscous Cephalopod, and it must be admitted tb a 
there is a basis of truth in this, as well as in the more recent 0l j e 
painted by Victor Hugo, in his eloquent book, “ Les Travailleurs de ! 
Mer.” Where, however, there is so much of the fictitious floating 
about, it will be our endeavour to eliminate facts only. 
