not like to hug the shore. Here the nets secured some splendid fish, the choryphenes, with blue flesh and golden tail, the flesh being unrivalled; hologymnoses, nearly scaleless, but of exquisite flavour; ostorhinques, with bony jaws; and the yellow thasards, which are equal to the bonita. All these fish were worthy of being “classed” in the kitchen.
Quitting these beautiful islands in the interval between the 4th and 11th December, the Nautilus ran about 2,000 miles. This part of the voyage was marked by one meeting with an immense shoal of calmars, a curious mollusc, very like the cuttle-fish. The French fishermen call them “horned” calmars, and they belong to the class of cephalopodes and the family of di-branchia, which includes likewise the cuttle and the argonaut. These animals were studied particularly by the naturalists of old, and furnished numerous metaphors to the orators, at the same time that they supplied an excellent dish to wealthy citizens—that is, if we may believe Athene, a Greek doctor, who lived before Galen.
It was during the night, 9–10th December, that the Nautilus encountered this army of nocturnal molluscs. They could be reckoned by millions. They emigrate from the temperate to the warmer zones, and follow the same mode of travelling as the herring and the sardine. We watched them through the thick crystal plates, swimming backwards with extreme rapidity, moving by means of their tubular locomotive power, and pursued by fish and molluscs, eating the smaller ones and being eaten by the larger, and moving to and fro in indescribable confusion the ten legs that nature had fixed upon their heads like a
