Here is a fish that has a saw instead of a sword. The teeth, you see, are on both sides of the saw. This fish is very large, and uses this weapon with great effect in its fights with whales and other monsters of the deep. It sometimes very foolishly pushes its saw into the bottom of a ship, as the sword-fish does his sword.
The porcupine.
What the porcupine does with his quills.
There are some animals that have very singular instruments of defense. The porcupine is one. It is covered with two kinds of quills. Those of one kind are long, slender, and curved. The others are short, straight, very stout, and have a sharp point. Whenever the porcupine is chased by any animal, and finds that he can not escape by running, he stops and bristles up all his quills, as you see in the previous engraving. He then backs, so that the short, sharp quills may stick into the animal that pursues him. It has been said that he shoots his quills at any one that attacks him. But this is not so. The error came from the fact, that if any of the quills happen to be a little loose, they fall out or stick into the flesh of his adversary.
The ink-bag of the cuttle-fish.
The cuttle-fish has a curious way of escaping from those fishes that attack him. He is a strangely-shaped animal, as you see. He has eight long arms, and the little spots that you see on these are suckers, with which he can stick to a rock, or can hold tightly any fish or shell that he catches. This queer-looking animal has inside of him a bag filled with a dark fluid like ink. This he uses as a means of defense in this way: if he is chased by a fish larger than he is, he empties his ink-bag in the water, and thus makes such a cloud that it blinds his pursuer, and then the cuttle-fish very easily gets out of the way.
