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Somehow, too, Doctor Seth Prescott's face always stood out for him plainly among them in purple. Always, sooner or later, Ozias Lamb would seize Doctor Prescott and Simon Basset as living illustrations and pointed examples of the social wrongs. "Look at them two men," he would say, "to come down to this town; look at them. You've heard about cuttle-fishes, J'rome, 'ain't ye?"
Thus it is probable that some four-gilled form was the progenitor of the dibranch cephalopods. Such being the case with regard to the organ of hearing, we have another yet stronger argument with regard to the organ of sight, as has been well pointed out by Mr. J. J. Murphy. In the cuttle-fishes we find an eye even more completely constructed on the vertebrate type than is the ear.
A skin corresponding to the mantle envelops the body, and the gills are on either side of it; the stomach with its winding canal, the liver, and heart occupy the centre of the body, as in the two other classes. This class includes all the Cuttle-Fishes, Squids, and Nautili, and has a vast number of fossil representatives.
Among the higher aquatic Invertebrata, cuttle-fishes and lobsters, for instance, there is a very considerable power of locomotion; and the aquatic Vertebrata are, considered as a class, much more active in their movements than the other inhabitants of the water.
Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already cited, compares the flower-like animal of the coral to a "poulpe," which is the French form of the name "polypus," "the many-footed," which the ancient naturalists gave to the soft-bodied cuttle-fishes, which, like the coral animal, have eight arms, or tentacles, disposed around a central mouth.
But the accidental discovery of Belemnites in due connection with black elongated masses which were: certainly fossilised ink-bags, inasmuch as the ink could be ground up and used for painting as well as if it were recent sepia, settled the question; and it became perfectly safe to prophesy that the creature which fabricated the Belemnite was a two-gilled cephalopod with suckers on its arms, and with all the other essential features of our living squids, cuttle-fishes, and Spirulae.
The shell of Nautilus is external, that of Spirula internal; Nautilus has four gills, Spirula two; Nautilus has multitudinous tentacles, Spirula has only ten arms beset with horny-rimmed suckers; Spirula, like the squids and cuttle-fishes, which it closely resembles, has a bag of ink which it squirts out to cover its retreat when alarmed; Nautilus has none.
The object of this kind of inquiry is to ascertain what are the uses of organs or structures, what they are for, as we say in colloquial language, to discover what are their functions and how these functions are useful or necessary to the life of the animals or plants to which they belong. For example, some Cuttle-fishes or Cephalopoda have eight arms or tentacles and others ten.
For in these latter the cornea is at first perforated, while different degrees of perforation of the same part are presented by different adult cuttle-fishes large in the calamaries, smaller in the octopods, and reduced to a minute foramen in the true cuttle-fish sepia.
We know as yet almost nothing of their history; when deciphered it will be as strange as any romance. The vertebrates are of course the most important line, as including the ancestors of man. But we must take a little glance at mollusks, including our clams, snails, and cuttle-fishes; and at the articulates, including annelids and culminating in insects.
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