3-034-822 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The eight-armed cuttle-fish in the Crystal Palace Aquarium, 1871. 'The aquarium now contains, with many other very interesting objects, several specimens of the poulpe, or eight-armed cuttle, Octopus vulgaris, obtained from the sea on the Devonshire and North Wales coasts. This is the animal which has been made famous under the names of devil-fish or man-sucker, by the sensational descriptions of it in Victor Hugo's Guernsey romance "Toilers of the Sea"...But as Mr. V. A. Lloyd, the superintendent of the aquarium, remarks in his protest against such exaggerations, "it is but wanton ignorance and vulgarity to call the octopus a devil-fish, when it has about it nothing diabolical or fishlike...The specimens under my care will, if I permit them, firmly affix themselves to my submerged bare hand...by the crowds of sucking discs beneath each of their long flexible legs, arms, or tentacles, and then they will draw themselves on till they get into a convenient position, and give a severe bite with their hard, horny pair of beaks or mandibles (not unlike those of a parrot), which are placed below, in the centre of the body, at the point whence the legs or arms radiate; but they soon leave go and drop off when I raise them above the water's surface'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.