THE MANTLE- CO VERED ANIMALS. 131 
planted in their flesh and held fast by the cups 
around them. 
Then there is our friend the Octopus with his body 
squeezed between the rocks and nothing but his bright, 
gleaming eyes to betray him, while his wife in another 
sheltered nook is watching over her eggs (e, Fig. 49) 
arranged in clusters on a stalk like a huge catkin 
of a nut-tree. A loving mother she is, sometimes 
dandling the eggs in the hollow web of her arms or 
cleaning them by spouting water from her funnel 
over them, as a gardener washes his plants with a 
hose. Week after week she will watch them, for 
though they do not need hatching, yet if she did 
not keep them clean they would be addled by living 
things growing over them ; then as each little bag 
bursts a tiny perfect octopus about the siz.e of a flea 
darts out, uses his funnel at once, and frolics to and 
fro in the water, his body blushing now with one 
colour and now with another. 
In our seas an octopus scarcely ever has arms 
more than two feet long, and a body about the size 
cf an ordinary lemon ; but in the Mediterranean they 
have been caught with arms four feet long and are 
much dreaded by the bathers, and in the British 
Museum there is an arm of a Calamary nine feet 
in length, so that the creature which carried it and 
which probably lived on the coasts of South America. 
must have been formidable indeed. 
But if there are ugly and dangerous "head-footed" 
animals, there are among them two lovely forms. 
The Argonaut, though she does not really sail on the 
water with her two arms raised as sails, as the poets 
imagined, yet forms such a lovely cradle for her eggs, 
