“The musket shots not having produced the desired results, harpoons were employed, but they took no hold on the soft, impalpable flesh of the marine monster. When it escaped from the harpoon, it dived under the ship, and came up again at the other side. They succeeded at last in getting the harpoon to bite, and in passing a bowline hitch round the posterior part of the animal. But when they attempted to hoist it out of the water the rope penetrated deeply into the flesh, and separated it into two parts, the head with the arms and tentacles dropping into the sea and making off, while the fins and posterior parts were brought on board: they weighed about forty pounds.” The crew wished to pursue it in a boat, but the commander refused, fearing that they might be capsized. “It is probable,” says M. Moquin‐Tandon,(40) “that this colossal mollusc was sick, or exhausted by a recent struggle with some other monster of the deep.” Most of the cephalopods secrete a blackish fluid, which they can eject in moments of danger, and thus cloud themselves in obscurity. This fluid was known to the Romans, who made ink from it. It is the leading ingredient in Indian ink and sepia to‐day. A story is told of an English officer abroad who went out just before dinner‐time for a walk on the beach, where he came across a cuttle‐fish sheltering under a hollow rock. For a time each watched the other in mute astonishment, but the cuttle‐fish had the best of it in the end. The aroused animal suddenly ejected a fountain of its black fluid over the officer’s trousers, which was the more annoying inasmuch as they were of white duck! The bone of the cuttle, powdered, has long been used, in combination with chalk, &c., as a dentifrice, so that the “monstrum horrendum” of Virgil is of some use in the world. The sixth family of the _Dibranchiata_ contains only one genus, _Argonauta_, of which the paper nautilus is a pleasing example. “Floating gracefully on the surface of the sea, trimming its tiny sail to the breeze, just sufficient to ruffle the surface of the waves, behold the exquisite living shallop! The elegant little bark which thus plays with the current is no work of human hands, but a child of nature: it is the argonaut, whose tribes, decked in a thousand brilliant shades of colour, are wanderers of the night in innumerable swarms on the ocean’s surface!” The Greek and Roman poets saw in it an elegant model of the ship which the skill and audacity of the man constructed who first braved the fury of the waves. To meet it was considered a happy omen. “O fish justly dear to navigators!” sang Oppian; “thy presence announces winds soft and friendly: thou bringest the calm, and thou art the sign of it!” Aristotle and Pliny both gave careful descriptions of it. In India the shell fetches a great price, and women consider it a fine ornament. Dancing‐girls carry them, and gracefully wave them over their heads.