The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
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. He dissects in both sexes the reproductive organs,
noting without exception all their essential and complicated parts; and
he had figured these in his lost volume of anatomical diagrams. He
describes the various kinds of eggs, and, with still more surprising
knowledge, shows us the little embryo cuttle-fish, with its great
yolk-sac attached, in apparent contrast to the chick's, to the little
creature's developing head.
But there is one other remarkable feature that he knew ages before it
was rediscovered, almost in our own time. In certain male cuttle-fishes,
in the breeding season, one of the arms develops in a curious fashion
into a long coiled whip-lash, and in the act of breeding may then be
transferred to the mantle-cavity of the female. Cuvier himself knew
nothing of the nature or the function of this separated arm, and indeed,
if I am not mistaken, it was he who mistook it for a parasitic worm. But
Aristotle tells us of its use and its temporary development, and of its
structure in detail, and his description tallies closely with the
accounts of the most recent writers.
A scarcely less minute account follows of the 'Malacostraca' or
crustaceans, the lobsters and the crabs, the shrimps and the prawns, and
others of their kind, a chapter to which Cuvier devoted a celebrated
essay. There be many kinds of crabs--the common kind, the big 'granny'
crabs, the little horsemen-crabs, that scamper over the sand and which
are for the most part empty, that is to say, whose respiratory cavities
are exceptionally large; and there are the freshwater crabs. There are
the little shrimps and the big hump-backed fellows, or prawns; there are
the 'crangons' or squillae; and the big lobsters and the crawfish or
'langoustes', their spiny cousins. We read about their beady eyes, which
turn every way; about their big rough antennae and the smaller,
smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with
its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the
end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her spawn. In
more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many
limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions
of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, and the
comparison or contrast between the two is drawn with elaborate
precision. In the former, besides other differences between male and
female, the female is said to have the 'first foot' (or leg) bifurcate,
while in the male it is undivided. It seems a trifling matter, but it is
true; it is so small a point that I searched long before at last I found
mention made of it in a German monograph. The puzzling thing is that it
is (as we should say) the last and not the first leg which is so
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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