The eggs of the octopus, when first laid, are small, oval, translucent granules, resembling little grains of rice, not quite an eighth of an inch long. They grow along and around a common stalk, to which every egg is separately attached, as grapes form part of a bunch. Each of the elongated bunches is affixed by a glutinous secretion to the surface of a rock or stone (never to seaweed, as has been erroneously stated), and hangs pendent by its stalk in a long white cluster, like a magnified catkin of the filbert, or, to use Aristotle’s simile, like the fruit of the white alder. The length and number of these bunches varies according to the age and condition of the parent. Those produced by a young octopus are seldom more than about three inches long, and from twelve to twenty in number; but a full-grown female will deposit from forty to fifty of such clusters, each about five inches in length. I have counted the eggs of which these clusters are composed, and find that there are about a thousand in each: so that a large octopus produces in one laying, usually extended over three days, a progeny of from 40,000 to 50,000. Our brooding French octopus, when undisturbed, would pass one of her arms beneath the hanging bunches of her eggs, and dilating the membrane on each side of it into a boat-shaped hollow, would gather and receive them in it as in a trough or cradle, exhibiting in its general shape and outline a remarkable similarity to those of the argonaut, or “paper-nautilus,” with the eggs of which octopod its own are, as I have already explained, almost identical in form and appearance. Then she would caress and gently rub them, occasionally turning towards them the mouth of her flexible exhalent and locomotor-tube, like the nozzle of a fireman’s hose-pipe, so as to direct upon them a jet of the excurrent water. I believe that the object of the syringing process is to free the eggs from parasitic animalcules, and possibly to prevent the growth of conferva, which I have found rapidly overspread those removed from her attention. Week after week, she continued to attend to them with the most watchful and assiduous care, seldom leaving them for an instant except to take food, which, without a brief abandonment of her position, would be beyond her reach. Aristotle asserted that while the female is incubating she takes no food. This is incorrect. In the tank with our specimen were seven others of her species, and to supply them with food about five-and-twenty living shore crabs (_Carcinus mænas_) were daily tossed into it. Although she so seldom left her nest, she generally obtained her share of these, and would seize with her suckers, and draw towards her, sometimes, three at a time, one by each of three of her arms. Their shells were soon broken and torn apart by her powerful beak, and when she had devoured the contents the hard _débris_ was cast out of her den.