Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/726



Between the mantle and the foot are two ridges which form the funnel, and their position shows them to be the epipodia. The otocysts and eyes are formed as invaginations of ectoderm, the former behind the eyes, at the sides of the funnel. All the nerve-centres, cerebral, visceral, pedal and optic, are formed as proliferations of the ectoderm. At the sides of the optic ganglia a pair of ectodermic invaginations are formed, which in the adult become the white bodies of the eyes, surrounding the optic ganglion. These are vestiges of lateral cerebral lobes which degenerate in the course of development.

The coelomic cavity appears as a symmetrical pair of spaces in the mesoderm, right and left of the intestine, and from it grow out the genital ducts and the renal organs. The gonad develops from the wall of the coelom.

Phylogeny and Classification.—The order is divided into two sub-orders, Decapoda and Octopoda, by the presence or absence of the tentacular arms. The Decapoda are more adapted for swimming than the Octopoda, the body being usually provided with fins. In the former also there is generally an internal shell of considerable size, often calcined, while in the Octopoda only the merest vestiges of a shell remain. There can be no doubt that the Octopoda were derived from the Decapoda, although from the absence of skeletal structures fossil remains of Octopods are almost entirely unknown. Palaeoctopus, however, occurs in the Cretaceous, while shells of Argonauta do not appear before the Pliocene. The Decapoda are abundantly represented in the Secondary formations by the Belemnitidae, whose shell (fig. 19) consists of a straight conical phragmacone covered posteriorly by a very thick rostrum, and produced anteriorly into a thin long proöstracum which is only occasionally preserved. In certain cases remains of the arms provided with hooks, and of the ink-sac, have been recognized. The Belemnitidae appear first in the Upper Trias, attain their maximum development in the Jurassic rocks, and are not continued into the Tertiary period, though represented in the Eocene by a few allied forms.

There is no difficulty in deriving the typical existing Decapoda from Belemnitidae, and many of the extinct forms may have been directly ancestral. Chitinous “pens” like that of Loligo, however, begin to appear in the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks, so that in this case as in many others the parent form and the modified form existed contemporaneously, and the latter alone has survived. The oldest shells of the Sepia type are from the Eocene, and it is perhaps possible that the Sepiidae arose separately from the Belemnites.

It is a curious fact that no fossil specimens of the genus Spirula have been found, but this may be due to the fact that it occurs only in deep water. At any rate there is no evidence that the shell of Spirula has lost a rostrum and a proöstracum; its characters must be regarded as primitive, not secondary. In the characters of the protoconch and of the commencement of the siphuncle, the shell of Spirula agrees with that of the Ammonoids, and in both its position is ventral, although in most Ammonoids the shell being exogastric the ventral side is the convex or external, while in Spirula the shell is endogastric and the siphuncle internal. The fact that the shell is not completely enclosed by the mantle is also a primitive character.

With regard to the general morphology of the Cephalopoda, it is difficult to reconcile the existence of two pairs of renal tubes as well as a pair of genital ducts in Nautilus with the view that the original Mollusc was unsegmented and had only one pair of coelomoducts. Considering the great specialization, however, and high degree of organization of the Cephalopods, it is evident that the earliest Nautiloid whose remains are known to us must have had a long evolutionary history behind it, and such metamerism as exists may have been developed in the course of its own history. In the other direction the evidence seems to prove that the Dibranchiata with only two renal ducts have been derived from the Tetrabranchiata.