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At the back of the beach, where the tree-ferns and the calamaries grew rankest, the foliage parted noiselessly at a height of perhaps twenty feet from the ground, and a dreadful head looked forth. Its jaws were both long and massive, and armed with immense, curved teeth like scimitars.
He describes the funnel and its relation to the mantle-sac, and the ink-bag, which he shows to be largest in Sepia of all others. He describes the character of the cuttle-bone in Sepia, and of the horny pen which takes its place in the various calamaries, and notes the lack of any similar structure in Octopus.
As they saw their fellow overwhelmed they launched themselves from their perch and came hooting hoarsely over the rank, green tops of the palms and feathery calamaries.
The flat land between the waterside and the cliffs, except for the wide strip of beach, was clothed with an enormous and riotous growth of calamaries, tree-ferns, cane and palm, which rocked and crashed in places as if some colossal wayfarers were pushing through them.
Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian tomahawk. Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.
We got, therefore, no Crustacea; neither did we get a single specimen of the Calamaries, which may be described as cuttlefish carrying hooks on their arms as well as suckers, the lingering descendants of a most ancient form, which existed at least as far back as the era of the shallow oolitic seas, x or y thousand years ago.
I do not say that there were not fossil forms quite as big as the gigantic calamaries of our own time on the contrary, I believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we must confess that, in the matter of invertebrates at least, the balance of size is all in favour of our own period.
He points out the two long arms of Sepia and of the calamaries, and their absence in the octopus; and he tells us, what was only confirmed of late, that with these two long arms the creature clings to the rock and sways about like a ship at anchor.
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.
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