The Sea and Its Living Wonders: A Popular Account of the Marvels of the Deep and of the Progress of Martime Discovery from the Earliest Ages to the Present TimeHartwig, G. (Georg)
History
The Sea and Its Living Wonders: A Popular Account of the Marvels of the Deep and of the Progress of Martime Discovery from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time
Hartwig, G. (Georg)
Animal behavior; Discoveries in geography; Discoveries in geography -- History; Marine animals; Marine plants; Ocean
The Sea-hare, however, furnishes us with the most curious form of these
stomachal teeth, for here we see not only the gizzard (_b_) armed with
horny pyramidal plates, whose tuberculated apices, meeting in the centre
of the organ, must necessarily bruise by their action whatever passes
through that cavity, but the third stomach (_d_) is also studded with
sharp-pointed hooks (_c_), resembling canine teeth, and admirably adapted
to pierce and subdivide the tough leathery fronds of the olive sea-weeds
on which the animal feeds. Thus these deformed and disgusting molluscs
afford us one of the most interesting examples of the adaptation of
organs to their functions, which an enlightened research is continually
finding in creation.
[Illustration: Compound stomach of Sea-Hare.]
Though not so gifted as the cephalopods, many of the gasteropods possess
all the organs of sense. Like them, they have an apparatus specially
calculated to appreciate sonorous undulations, and consisting of a
membranous vesicle attached to an auditive nerve, and containing either
a single spherical otolithe or a larger number of similar smaller
calcareous bodies, which by their vibrations communicate the impression
of sound to the nerve. Their minute eyes are short-sighted, it is true,
and frequently either entirely wanting or, as in the Nudibranchiates,
scarcely able to distinguish light from darkness; but their inactive
habits require no wide field of vision, and thus they see as much of the
external world as is necessary for their humble sphere of existence. The
organs of sight are generally situated either on a prominence at the base
of the superior pair of tentacles or, as, for instance, in the Murex, at
the extremity of these organs (_a_, _b_), a position which enables the
animal to direct them readily to different objects.
[Illustration: Tentacles and eye of Murex.
_c._ Eye highly magnified.]
Many of the Gasteropods are evidently capable of perceiving odours; thus,
animal substances let down in a net to the bottom will attract thousands
of Nassæ in one night. We also may infer that they are not deficient
in taste from the presence of papillæ at the bottom of their mouth,
analogous to those found on the tongue of other animals; but, of all
their senses, that of touch is undoubtedly the most perfect. The whole
soft surface of the body is indeed of exquisite sensibility, but more
especially the vascular foot, and the tentacles, or horns, which vary
both in number and in shape in different genera. Yet, in spite of this
delicacy in the organisation of the skin, which makes it so sensible of
contact, it appears to have been beneficently ordered that animals so
helpless and exposed to injury from every quarter are but little sensible
to pain. Although they are deprived of all higher instincts, we find
among the Gasteropods a few examples of concealment under extraneous
objects, which remind us of the masks and artifices frequently employed
by the insects and crustaceans.
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