e sudden
apparition of the devil-fish, that Medusa with its eight serpents.

No grasp is like the sudden strain of the cephaloptera.

It is with the sucking apparatus that it attacks. The victim is
oppressed by a vacuum drawing at numberless points: it is not a clawing
or a biting, but an indescribable scarification. A tearing of the flesh
is terrible, but less terrible than a sucking of the blood. Claws are
harmless compared with the horrible action of these natural air-cups.
The talons of the wild beast enter into your flesh; but with the
cephaloptera it is you who enter into the creature. The muscles swell,
the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the
loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the
lymph of the monster, which clings to its victim by innumerable hideous
mouths. The hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man becomes one
with the hydra. The spectre lies upon you: the tiger can only devour
you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away. He draws you
to him, and into himself; while bound down, glued to the ground,
powerless, you feel yourself gradually emptied into this horrible pouch,
which is the monster itself.

These strange animals, Science, in accordance with its habit of
excessive caution even in the face of facts, at first rejects as
fabulous; then she decides to observe them; then she dissects,
classifies, catalogues, and labels; then procures specimens, and
exhibits them in glass cases in museums. They enter then into her
nomenclature; are designated mollusks, invertebrata, radiata: she
determines their position in the animal world a little above the
calamaries, a little below the cuttle-fish; she finds for these hydras
of the sea an analogous creature in fresh water called the argyronecte:
she divides them into great, medium, and small kinds; she admits more
readily the existence of the small than of the large species, which is,
however, the tendency of science in all countries, for she is by nature
more microscopic than telescopic. She regards them from the point of
view of their construction, and calls them Cephaloptera; counts their
antennae, and calls them Octopedes. This done, she leaves them. Where
science drops them, philosophy takes them up.

Philosophy in her turn studies these creatures. She goes both less far
and further. She does not dissect, but meditate. Where the scalpel has
laboured, she plunges the hypothesis. She