“When at Bermuda,” he said, “in 1868, whilst sitting on a rock near the water, I saw a curious instance of the power of locomotion of these beasts. A small octopus emerged from the water, apparently in great terror: in two seconds he was followed by a larger one, evidently in chase. The little fellow might have been ten inches over all, the larger one about eighteen, or perhaps twenty, inches. Their mode of progression was most singular: in position something like the ‘arabs’ of the London streets, but not turning. Five arms seemed to be used in walking, or, rather, progressive motion; the remaining three being reserved for seizing. I should think the rate at which both animals went was as fast as a man could possibly walk, i.e., between five and six miles an hour. A larger octopus would undoubtedly cause a man following it to run, unless it chose to turn and face him.”
Both of these accounts of the locomotive powers of the octopus are perfectly clear and definite; and, therefore, although we may say, with Horatio,—“This is wondrous strange!” we must either entirely disbelieve two credible witnesses, or apply to the case the aphorism of Hamlet:—“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”
CHAPTER VI.
NEW LIMBS FOR OLD ONES.
It is a not uncommon occurrence that when an octopus is caught, it is found to have one or more of its arms shorter than the rest, and showing marks of having been amputated, and of the formation of a new growth from the old cicatrix. Several such specimens have been brought to the Brighton Aquarium; one of which was particularly interesting. Two of its arms had evidently been bitten off about four inches from the base; and out from the end of each healed stump (which, in proportion to the length of the limb, was as if a man’s arm had been amputated half-way between the shoulder and elbow) grew a slender little piece of newly-formed arm, about as large as a lady’s stiletto, or a small button-hook—in fact, just the equivalent of worthy Captain Cuttle’s iron hook, which did duty for his lost hand. It was not a specimen of the remarkable hectocotylus development of the arm of the male octopus which takes place during the breeding season, but an illustrative example of the repair and restoration of a mutilated limb.[17]
This reparative power is possessed by some other animals, of which the starfishes and crustacea are the most familiar instances. The lobster and the crab, if they find themselves in depressing circumstances, are addicted to malingering. They do not go so far as to commit suicide; but, stopping short of that, perpetrate a kind of demi-semi-self-immolation. In a sudden passion of fear or anger, they will sometimes fling off one or both of their large claws, and that which they thus do impulsively and in haste, they repent and repair at leisure—like the intemperate man we sometimes read of in the police news, who goes home and smashes the crockery, and, when he is able to reflect on his folly, is glad to make good the damage as quickly and as quietly as he can.
The starfishes, too, as the common “five-finger” (Uraster), and the brittle-star (Ophiocoma),—which by-the-by, is not half as brittle as has been supposed—can throw off their limbs in a pet, and grow them again. But in both of these the act is voluntary, and the dismemberment complete. If the claw of a lobster or crab be severed, or wounded in any part of its length, the animal will bleed, and waste, and die of the consequent exhaustion. I have noticed that, especially in the spiny lobster or sea cray-fish (Palinurus), the blood flows freely many hours after death, and that when I have had occasion to remove the abdominal and caudal leaf-like appendages of a dead cray-fish for dissection and microscopical examination, the blood and serum have poured from the part where the cut has been made, and thickened on the stone slab in a firm, gelatinous sheet, of the colour and consistency of guava jelly.
The only joint from which new growth can start in the crustacea is that connected with the body. The whole limb must be got rid of. The octopus, on the contrary, is incapable of voluntary dismemberment, but has the faculty of reproducing, as an outgrowth from the old stump, any portion of an arm (or leg) which may have been lost by misadventure. I say “arm or leg,” for one hardly knows which these eight appendages should be called. If they are legs, the octopus can hold on with them as tightly as the “old man of the sea” gripped Sinbad the Sailor, and use them as dexterously as the “armless girl,” who cuts out with hers the pretty paper designs which she sells to visitors. If they are arms, he can walk on them, head downwards, under water, more cleverly than the most agile monkey or street arab. So we may call them either or both.
Returning to our mutilated octopus;—we transfer him from the tank in which he had been temporarily placed to the wet pavement, that we may better observe his movements when crawling. He scrambles and shuffles away, and makes the best use he can of the jury-rigging he has fitted on to his old stumps. As he does so, his keen eyes, mounted on little hillocks, peer furtively around him; and while he sidles off from his too admiring persecutors, he casts a doubtful, half-frightened, half-defiant glance behind him, like a schoolboy, timid in the dark, who fancies a ghost is following him. His cousin the cuttle-fish (Sepia) has an eye, round like that of an owl, which stares you out of countenance, and puzzles you by its immobility; the pupil of the eye of an octopus is like that of a tiger turned half round. The perpendicularly-elongated pupil of the cat gleams with hot ferocity: the calm, cunning gaze of the octopus from out the narrow horizontal slit of its compressed eyelids freezes by its cold cruelty.