Aristotle THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

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128 pages - You are on Page 101

In the sepia, the teuthis, and the teuthus the hard parts are within, towards the back of the body; those parts are called in one the sepium, and in the other the 'sword'. They differ from one another, for the sepium in the cuttle-fish and teuthus is hard and flat, being a substance intermediate between bone and fishbone, with (in part) a crumbling, spongy texture, but in the teuthis the part is thin and somewhat gristly. These parts differ from one another in shape, as do also the bodies of the animals. The octopus has nothing hard of this kind in its interior, but it has a gristly substance round the head, which, if the animal grows old, becomes hard.

The females differ from the males. The males have a duct in under the oesophagus, extending from the mantle-cavity to the lower portion of the sac, and there is an organ to which it attaches, resembling a breast; (see diagram) in the female there are two of these organs, situated higher up; (see diagram) with both sexes there are underneath these organs certain red formations. The egg of the octopus is single, uneven on its surface, and of large size; the fluid substance within is all uniform in colour, smooth, and in colour white; the size of the egg is so great as to fill a vessel larger than the creature's head. The sepia has two sacs, and inside them a number of eggs, like in appearance to white hailstones. For the disposition of these parts I must refer to my anatomical diagrams.

The males of all these animals differ from the females, and the difference between the sexes is most marked in the sepia; for the back of the trunk, which is blacker than the belly, is rougher in the male than in the female, and in the male the back is striped, and the rump is more sharply pointed.

There are several species of the octopus. One keeps close to the surface, and is the largest of them all, and near the shore the size is larger than in deep water; and there are others, small, variegated in colour, which are not articles of food. There are two others, one called the heledone, which differs from its congeners in the length of its legs and in having one row of suckers-all the rest of the molluscs having two,-the other nicknamed variously the bolitaina or the 'onion,' and the ozolis or the 'stinkard'.

There are two others found in shells resembling those of the testaceans. One of them is nicknamed by some persons the nautilus or the pontilus, or by others the 'polypus' egg'; and the shell of this creature is something like a separate valve of a deep scallop-shell. This polypus lives very often near to the shore, and is apt to be thrown up high and dry on the beach; under these circumstances it is found with its shell detached, and dies by and by on dry land. These polypods are small, and are shaped, as regards the form of their bodies, like the bolbidia. There is another polypus that is placed within a shell like a snail; it never comes out of the shell, but lives inside the shell like the snail, and from time to time protrudes its feelers.

So much for molluscs.

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