[Illustration: THE COMMON NAUTILUS (_Nautilus pompilius_.)] The order _Dibranchiata_ contains six families, mostly of formidable and repulsive nature. They include cuttle‐fish, squids, and argonauts, and these must mainly occupy our attention. What wonderful things have not been written about them! The French have found in them a fertile theme. “It is now,” says Michelet, “however, necessary to describe a much graver world—a world of rapine and of murder. From the very beginning, from the first appearance of life, violent death appeared; sudden refinement, useful but cruel purification of all which has languished, or which may linger or languish, of the slow and feeble creation whose fecundity had encumbered the globe. “In the more ancient formations of the Old World we find two murderers—a nipper and a sucker. The first is revealed to us by the imprint of the trilobite, an order now lost, the most destructive of extinct beings. The second subsists in one gigantic fragment, a beak nearly two feet in length, which was that of a great sucker, or cuttle‐fish (_sepia_). If we may judge from such a beak, this monster—if the other parts of the body were in proportion—must have been enormous; its ventose invincible arms, of perhaps twenty or thirty feet, like those of some monstrous spider. In making war on the molluscs he remains mollusc also; that is to say, always an embryo. He presents the strange—almost ridiculous, if it were not also terrible—appearance of an embryo going to war; of a fœtus furious and cruel, soft and transparent, but tenacious, breathing with a murderous breath—for it is not for food alone that it makes war: it has the wish to destroy. Satiated, and even bursting, it still destroys. Without defensive armour, under its threatening murmurs there is no peace; its safety is to attack. It regards all creatures as a possible enemy. It throws about its long arms, or rather thongs, armed with suckers, at random.” Victor Hugo’s description of the monster, the devil‐fish (or octopus), with whom poor Gilliatt has that terrible encounter, will not fade from the mind of any one who has once read it. The poet‐novelist tells us that he founded his narration on facts that came under his own notice. “Near Breck‐Hou, in Sark,” says he, “they show a cave where a devil‐fish, a few years since, seized and drowned a lobster‐fisher.... He who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes, at Sark, in the cavern called the Boutiques, a _pieuvre_ (cuttle‐fish) swimming, and pursuing a bather. When captured and killed, this specimen was found to be four English feet broad, and one could count its four hundred suckers. The monster thrust them out convulsively, in the agony of death.” Hugo’s wonderful description of the monster, though often technically wrong, principally from exaggeration, must have some place here. He grasps the facts of nature with the appreciation of the artist rather than of the scientist.