United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some take to flight, others hide themselves; the cuttle-fish vomits blood; the cramp-fish benumbs; and there are many animals that, by their intolerable stink, oblige their pursuers to retire.
To what manner of awful monster this portion of limb belonged, I could only faintly imagine; but of course I remembered, as any sailor would, that from my earliest sea-going I had been told that the cuttle-fish was the biggest in the sea, although I never even began to think it might be true until now.
What difference in rank, for instance, is there between an oyster and a cuttle-fish? between a cochineal and a bee or ant? and yet the first two belong to one and the same type the type of mollusca; and the last three to one and the same class the class of insects.
The substance, however, is not really `bone, but is composed of thin layers of the purest white chalk, which, when the cuttle-fish is living, is embedded in the body of the animal, running through its entire length. The cuttle-fish in which this so-called bone is generally met with, is the same species from whence the well-known colour sepia used in painting is usually obtained.
Whittier once spoke of "Young Goodman Brown" as indicating a mental peculiarity in Hawthorne, which like the cuttle-fish rarely rises to the surface. The plot is cynical, and largely enigmatical.
The clutch of the keg seemed like something alive; something so all-powerful like the twining feelers of the giant cuttle-fish. Slowly they saw the doomed man's legs disappear, and already the slimy muck was above his middle. The minutes dragged along the black slime rose it was at Lablache's breast.
There was a semi-lunar implement in the boats also, with four internal prongs, at the end of a long shaft, used for catching cuttle-fish. At the hotel in which we stayed on our first visit there was a green-and-yellow parrot which was very tame. His accomplishments included the saying "Marietta, padrona, and hello" quite clearly, singing and laughing.
She was so afraid she would scream out, that she nearly choked herself to death with her sleeve, while her alarmed maids, though meaning nothing by their acts but friendly help, slapped her back to give her breath. There, at the top of a high green rock, all covered with barnacles, on a huge tuft of sponge, sat Lord Cuttle-fish, playing on three musical instruments at once.
For instance, among the mammalia the pachydermata, among the reptilia the salamander and newt, among the articulata the cephalopoda, are at present remarkably reduced; compare with the legions of ammonites and belemnites of the secondary period the small number of nautilus and cuttle-fish of the seas at the present day.
And in some whole groups of animals and in certain members of other groups, the embryo does not at any period differ widely from the adult: thus Owen has remarked in regard to cuttle-fish, "there is no metamorphosis; the cephalopodic character is manifested long before the parts of the embryo are completed;" and again in spiders, "there is nothing worthy to be called a metamorphosis."
Word Of The Day