SEPTAD^. CUTTLE. 
167 
young Polilps are caught with a line weighted with lead, 
furnished with a cork fitted with several hooks, covered 
with pieces of scarlet cloth, twisted into thongs. He 
adds, that the largest Poiilp he ever saw was about three 
yards long, and weighed nearly half a hundredweight. 
Poiiips of thirty pounds weight are not rare at Nice, and 
those of twenty pounds are common.* In the Poly- 
nesian islands, the natives have a curious contrivance for 
catching cuttle-fish. It consists of a straight piece of hard 
wood, a foot long, round and polished, and not half an inch 
in diameter. Near one end of it, a number of beautiful 
pieces of the cowrie, or tiger-shell, are fastened one over 
another, like the scales of a fish, until it is nearly the 
size of a turkey^s egg, and resembles the cowrie. It is 
suspended in a horizontal position by a strong line, and 
lowered by the fisherman from a small canoe, till it 
nearly reaches the bottom. The fisherman jerks the 
line to cause the shell to move, as if it were alive, and 
the jerking motion is called tootoofe, the name of the 
contrivance. The cuttle-fish, attracted by the cowries, 
darts out one of its arms, and then another, and so on, 
until it is quite fastened among the openings between 
the pieces of the cowrie, when it is drawn up into the 
canoe and secured. 
Octopus vulgaris is rare on the British coast. I re- 
collect that, about fifteen or sixteen years ago, one was 
found on the shore at Beachy Head, by two fishermen, 
who put it into a large bucket or tub, and took it round 
to most of the houses at Eastbourne for exhibition ; and 
Mr. Gosse found one in 1860 on the beach at Babbi- 
combe. Dr. Spence, of Lerwick, in 1862, sent an ac- 
count to Dr. Allman, Professor of Natural History at 
* See notes in ‘ Life in Normandy,’ vol. i. pp. 293, 298. — D.D. 
