460 
the ocean world. 
The Aegonauta or Nautilus. 
Floating gracefully on the surface of the sea, trimming its tiny sail 
to the breeze, just sufficient to ruffle the surface of the waves, behold 
the exquisite living shallop. The elegant little bark which thus plays 
with the current is no work of human hands, but a child of Nature : 
it is the Argonaut, whose tribes, decked in a thousand brilliant shades 
of colour, are wanderers of the night in innumerable swarms on the 
ocean’s surface. 
The marine shell which Linnaeus called the Argonaut enjoyed great 
renown among the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was the subject 
of graceful legends; it had inspired great poets; it occupied the 
attention of Aristotle, who called it the Nautilus and Nauticos, and 
of Pliny, who called it Pompylius. Few animals, indeed, have been 
so celebrated, so anciently known. The Greek and Roman poets 
saw in it an elegant model of the ship which the skill and audacity of 
the man constructed who first braved the fury of the waves ; in the 
words of the poet, “ armour of triple oak and triple brass covered 
the heart of him who first confided himself in a frail bark to the 
relentless waves 
“ Illi robur et ses triplex 
Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem traci 
Commisit pelago intern 
Primus ” 
Horace, I. Car. iii. I. 9. 
To meet the Pompylius was, according to the superstitious Roman, 
a favouiable presage. This little oceanic wanderer, in spite of th^ 
capiicious waves, was a tutelar divinity, who guarded the navigator 
in his course, and assured him of a happy passage. Listen to the 
immortal author of the first Natural History of Animals, the philo- 
sophical Aristotle. “The Nautilus Polyp,” says the learned his- 
torian, “is ol the nature of animals which pass for extraordinary, f 01 ' 
it can float on the sea ; it raises itself from the bottom of the water* 
the shell being reversed and empty, but when it reaches the surface d 
readjusts it. It has between the arms a species of tissue similar to 
that which unites the toes of web-footed birds. When there is a littF 
wind, it employs this tissue as a sort of rudder, letting it fall into tb e 
