the light. In the last place, the eight-armed Cephalopods were known to be a set of prying, inquisitive fellows, fond of poking their tails into every hole and crevice where they could, by any possibility, manage to squeeze them; and, on one occasion, one of them was actually taken with its body wedged into a small butter-jar, in which it had, no doubt, gone proudly careering through the water, till at last, attracted by the tempting appearance of a baited hook, it ventured a nibble, and so got caught.

The

Evidently the case of the Argonaut was a suspicious one. What had its friends to say on the other side, and to show that the shell it occupied was really of its own fabrication? Two things, and two only they could advance :-first, that the shell had never been found on any other animal; secondly, that the Argonaut had never been found in any other shell. defence was a meagre one certainly, but it was to the purpose; and, notwithstanding that the general voice went against it, the Argonaut had many champions on its side, who stoutly maintained that it was both architect and rightful owner of the graceful little bark in which, by general consent, it sailed so proudly on the bosom of the deep.

Thus had the question stood for centuries, no new facts of any moment being added, and the disputation going on as stoutly as ever, when at length, and only a few years ago, a lady entered the field, and, by a few simple experiments and observations, put the philosophers to open shame, and for ever set at rest the longdisputed question.

Madame Jeannette Power, a French lady residing on the shores of the Bay of Messina, where the Argonaut is of frequent occurrence, enclosed several of the animals in a sort of cage, fenced off from the sea at the water-side, and there studied their history in all its stages. In this way Madame Power ascertained that the Argonaut is the indisputable fabricator of the shell it inhabits; that the shell regularly increases with the growth of the animal; and that its first formation, and all subsequent repairs that it may need, are effected by the broad membraneous expansions which the Argonaut was reputed to hoist as sails to catch the breeze. The results of Madame Power's investigations came upon the scientific world as a perfect surprisal; and, in

1839, the lady put the cap of completeness on her labours, by forwarding to the principal learned societies of Europe sets of specimens of the Argonaut and its shell of all sizes; hoping, no doubt, to teach the disputatious philosophers how much better than theory or argument is a little patient watching and painstaking examination of actual facts.

It was enough for a lady to do, to clear the character of the Argonaut, and to establish its title to the shell in which it had won such renown as a navigator. It would have been an unseemly thing for those fair hands to have stripped the little Cephalopod of its laurels; and Madame Power was content to believe with the rest of mankind, that, far out at sea, as the poet sang, the Argonaut—

"Put out a tier of oars on either side,

Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,
And mounted up and glided down the billow
In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air,
And wander in the luxury of light."

But there was double justice to be done. The Argonaut had been proved innocent of piracy, and now, by the same stern rule of right, it was to lose its reputation as a sailor.

Nearly at the same time as Madame Power was attending to her little protégés in the Bay of Messina, M. Sander Rang was carrying on a somewhat similar course of observations on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean at Algiers. The researches of this gentleman are entirely corroborative of those of Madame Power as to the secretion of the shell by the so-called sails; but they go further, and show, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Argonaut has no such power, as is commonly supposed, of hoisting these expanded membranes to "catch the driving gale," and so to sail along the deep. The little Cephalopod can certainly raise itself from below, and sport about at the surface of the water, but it does this with its membraneous flaps closely wrapped about its shell, and by precisely the same means as the Cephalopods in general-namely, by the forcible ejection of water from the funnel. M. Rang, therefore, completely upsets the Argonaut's reputation as a sailor; but, then, he makes him known to us in a new character-that of a crawler at the seabottom, where, it appears, the animal creeps along with its head

downwards, and its shell upon its back, much after the manner of the common snail. Most terribly true, therefore, is it here, that

"All charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy."

Once we had a little voyageur all elegance and grace

"The ocean Mab, the fairy of the sea;"

but "cold philosophy" comes and touches it; and, lo! the favourite of the poets becomes a mere commonplace crawler at the sea-bottom.

But let us be consoled. Philosophy has revealed more wonders than it has marred; and, with all deference to the author of "Lamia," prosaic truths are far better than poetic fictions.