[Illustration: FIG. 1.--BEAK AND ARMS OF A DECAPOD CUTTLE.
_a_, the eight shorter arms; _t_, the tentacles; _f_, the funnel, or locomotor tube.]
Unlike the octopus, which is capable only of short flights through the water, the "cuttles" and "squids," such as _Sepia_ and _Loligo_, are all free swimmers. For them it is necessary for accuracy of natation that their soft, and in the squids long bodies, should be supported by such a framework as they possess. In _Sepia_, the mantle-sac is flattened horizontally all along its lateral edges so as to form a pair of fins, which nearly surround the trunk. These fins could never be used, as they are, to enable the animal to poise itself delicately in the water by means of their beautiful undulations, which I have often watched with delight, if their attached edges were not kept in a straight line on either side. Then, these ten-footed or ten-armed genera have not, because they need them not, eight long, strong and highly mobile arms like those of the octopus, nor have they large suckers upon them. Whereas a great length of reach is an advantage to the octopus, animals which are purely swimmers, and which hunt and overtake their prey by speed, would be impeded by having to drag after them a bundle of stout, lengthy appendages trailing heavily astern. Their eight pedal arms are short and comparatively weak, though strong enough, in individuals such as are regarded on our own coasts as fullgrown, to seize and hold a fish or crustacean as strong as a good sized shore-crab. But, as compensation for the shortness of the eight arms, they are provided with two others more than three times the length of the short ones. These are so slender that they generally lie coiled up in a spiral cone in two pockets, one on each side, just below the eye, when the animal is quiescent, and are only seen when it takes its food. These long, slender tentacular arms are expanded at their extremity, and the inner surface of their enlarged part is studded with suckers--some of them larger in size than those on the eight shorter arms. As the food of these swimmers consists, of course, chiefly of fish, their sucking disks are curiously modified for the better retention of a slippery captive. A horny ring with a sharply serrated edge is imbedded in the outer circumference of each of them, and when a vacuum is formed, the keen, saw-like teeth are pressed into the skin or scales of the unfortunate prisoner, and deprive it of the slightest chance of escape.