The first octopus received at the Brighton Aquarium was caught in a lobster-pot at Eastbourne in October 1872, and great was the joy that reigned in “London-by-the-sea.” For in the state of public feeling then existing, an aquarium without an octopus was like a plum-pudding without plums. Share-holders might construct a handsome building, and stock its magnificently gigantic tanks with a variety of most interesting fishes, but fashion and public opinion demanded of them a “devil-fish,” and if they were unable to exhibit one, all other attractions were disregarded. The new octopus became “the rage.” Visitors jostled each other, and waited their turn to obtain a peep at him—often a tantalizing exercise of patience, for the picturesque rock-work in the tanks provided so many hiding places, that, until these were partially filled with cement, the popular favourite only occasionally condescended to show himself. Poor fellow! his career was short, and his end sudden and shocking. During the interregnum between the death of my friend John Keast Lord, and the appointment of a successor to him in the curatorship, it became necessary to clean out a tank in which were some “Nurse-hounds,” or “Larger spotted dog-fishes,” _Scyllium stellare_. No hostility between them and the octopus being anticipated by their attendant, they were temporarily placed with it, and, for a while, they seemed to dwell together as peaceably as the “happy family” of animals that used to be exhibited in a travelling cage at the foot of Waterloo Bridge; the octopus usually remaining within the “Cottage-by-the-sea” which he had built for himself in the form of a grotto of living oysters, and the dog-fish apparently taking no notice of him. But one fatal day—the 7th of January, 1873—the “devil-fish” was missing, and it was seen that one of the “companions of his solitude” was inordinately distended. A thrill of horror ran through the corridors. There was suspicion of crime and dire disaster. The corpulent nurse-hound was taken into custody, lynched and disembowelled, and his guilt made manifest. For there, within his capacious stomach, unmutilated and entire, lay the poor octopus who had delighted thousands during the Christmas holidays. It had been swallowed whole, and very recently, but life was extinct.[10]