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 bowling 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.
Plate XXIV.—Gigantic Cuttle-fish caught by the French Corvette Alecton, near Teneriffe.
The crew were eager to pursue, and would have launched a boat, but the commander refused, fearing that the animal might capsize it. The object was not, in his opinion, one in which he could risk the lives of his crew. Pl. XXIV. is copied from M. Berthelot's coloured representation of this scene. "It is probable," M. Moquin-Tandon remarks, commenting on M. Berthelot's recital, "that this colossal mollusc was sick or exhausted by some recent struggle with some other monster of the deep, which would account for its having quitted its native rocks in the depths of the ocean. Otherwise it would have been more active in its movements, or it would have obscured the waves with the inky liquid which all the Cephalopods have at command. Judging from its size, it would carry at least a barrel of this black liquid, if it had not been exhausted in some recent struggle."
"Is this mollusc a calmar?" asks the same writer. "If we might judge from the figure drawn by one of the officers of the Alecton during the struggle, and communicated by M. Berthelot, the animal had terminal fins, like the calmars; but it has eight equal arms, like the cuttle-fish. Now the calmars have ten, two of them being very long. Was this some intermediate species between the two? Or must we admit, with MM. Crosse and Fisher, that the animal had lost its more formidable tentacles in some recent combat?"[13]
The fifth family, Octopodidæ, contains Eledone, Octopus, Pinnoctopus, Cirroteuthis, Philonexis, and Scærgus.
The Octopoda, without tentacles, have eight long arms, united at the base by a web; the suckers in two rows, which are sessile; the eyes fixed; shell, two short stiles enclosed in the mantle; the body united to the head by a broad neck-band; no side-fins; shell internal and rudimentary in the British species; body oval, warty, and without fins, in Octopus; small and oblong, arms tapering and webbed, and suckers in a single row, in Eledone (Fig. 321).
Fig. 321. Eledone, Octopus vulgaris (Lamarck).
In his great work, Professor Owen proposes to divide the Cephalopods into two groups, which he calls Dibranchiata, characterised by the presence of two branchiæ, which would bring together all the naked Cephalopods, including Sepia, Loligo, Octopus, Kassia, and Ommastrephos; and Tetrabranchiata, having four branchiæ, to which the Nautilus, and most of the fossil Cephalopods, such as the Ammonites, belong. Most of the first group are represented in the British seas, but the second are altogether absent.