Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/272

 till about 4 we saw a large steamer running westward, on the opposite tack. Her masts were for an instant visible, but she could not perceive the Nautilus, which was so low in the water. I fancied that this steamer belonged to the Peninsular and Oriental Company, plying between Ceylon and Sydney, touching at King George’s Point and Mel- bourne.

At 5, before the quickly-passing twilight, which joins day and night in tropical countries, Conseil and I were astonished by a very curious sight.

It was a pretty animal we saw, the appearance of which, according to the ancients, betokened good luck. Aristotle, Pliny, &c., had studied its habits and exhausted in respect of it all the poetry of the savants of Greece and Italy. They called them Nautilus and Pompylius; but modern science has not endorsed these appellations, and the mollusc is now known as the argonaut.

If anyone had consulted Conseil, he would have told them that the molluscs are divided into five classes; that the first class, that of the cephaloids, are shell-less sometimes, sometimes tentacular, and include two families—the dibranchiæ and the tetrabranchiæ. The former family includes three genus—the argonaut, the calmar, and the “seiche,” while the other has only one genus—the nautilus. If, after this distinction, anyone confuses the argonaut, which is acetabulifer, or air-carriers, with the nautilus, which is tentaculifer, or carrying tentacles, there can be no excuse for him.

Now this was a shoal of argonauts which were sailing along. We could reckon them by hundreds; they belonged to the tubercular argonauts, which are peculiar to the Indian seas.

These graceful molluscs moved backwards by mean of