PREFACE.
When I accepted the position of Naturalist of the Brighton Aquarium, after the death of my valued friend John Keast Lord, it became my pleasant duty to watch and record events and circumstances connected with the habits and development of the denizens of the tanks.
My notes of observations have, from time to time, appeared in the Natural History columns of Land and Water, and have been honoured by frequent quotation in the Times and other newspapers. Grateful for the kind reception accorded to them in their original form, I re-publish them with considerable additions. They have, in fact, been almost entirely re-written. I venture to hope that they may be interesting to the public, and of some little value to science.
I have always endeavoured to observe carefully, to describe faithfully, to record facts rather than to propound theories, and to relate what I have seen and learned in language comprehensible by all.
With excellent opportunities of studying the habits and movements of living cephalopods, and with dead specimens of these animals on the table before me, I have followed, scalpel in hand, the minute description of their anatomy given by Professor Owen, in his masterly treatise in the “Cyclopædia of Anatomy,” and by De Ferussac and D’Orbigny in their splendid monograph on the same subject; the two great sources from which almost all, if not all, subsequent writers have drawn much of their information. Quotations from other authors will be found duly noted.
I am indebted to my friend Mr. Thomas Davidson, F.R.S., &c., for the beautiful portrait of the Octopus, which forms the frontispiece to this volume; to Mrs. Edward Harris for the drawing of its eggs (fig. 6); to Miss Gertrude Woodward for that of its tongue (fig. 4); and to Messrs. West and Co., and Mr. Charles A. Ferrier, for the care they have respectively bestowed on the lithographing and engraving of the illustrations.
HENRY LEE.
Brighton Aquarium,
August, 1875.