Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/365

Rh The octopus swims backward, and it has been remarked that it changes its color to a darker hue when it starts out for a swim.

This change of hue, apparently at will, is one of the most peculiar characteristics of the octopus. It may be considered the chameleon of the sea. Its ordinary color when in repose is a mottled brown; but if irritated it assumes a reddish hue, approaching to purple. Nature seems to have been almost superfluously careful in furnishing this animal with protecting elements; for this coloring-matter, which resides between the inner and outer skin, enables it even to assume the color of the ground or rocks over which it travels, so that one can hardly say what color it is before it may have changed to something quite different. When exhausted after a battle or a struggle to get out of a trap, it turns pale, like a human being.



Others besides Victor Hugo's hero have had a chance to test the strength of these devil-fishes. Major Newsome, R. E., when stationed on the east coast of Africa in 1856-'57, undertook to bathe in a pool of water left by the retiring waves. He says: "As I swam from one end to the other, I was horrified at feeling something around my ankle, and made for the side as speedily as I could. I thought at first it was only sea-weed; but as I landed and trod with my foot on the rock, my disgust was heightened at feeling a fleshy and slippery substance under me. I was, I confess, alarmed; and so apparently was the beast on which I trod, for he detached himself and made for the water. Some fellow-bathers came to my assistance, and he was eventually landed. . . . As the grasp of an ordinary-sized octopus holding to a rock is not less than thirty pounds, while the floating power of a man is between five and six pounds, I believe if I had not kept in mid-channel it would have been a life-and-death struggle between myself and the beast on my ankle. In the open water I was the best man; but near the bottom or sides, which he could have reached with his arms, but which I could not have reached with mine, he would certainly have drowned me."

The major was right; he had every chance of sharing the fate of the immortal Clubin.