Nautilus
Nautilus names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Nautilus The Paper, an eight-armed mollusk
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
The Paper, an eight-armed mollusk. It is allied to the cuttlefish and is related somewhat remotely to the chambered nautilus with which the poet Holmes confounded it. It is abundant in the Mediterranean. It is known to science as the Argonauta argo and is called commonly the argonaut. The male and the female differ widely. The body is an ovoid fibrous sack, the mouth of which terminates in eight tentacles armed with suckers. The body of the male is about an inch in length and is without a covering of shell. One of the tentacles of the male is developed into a long, whip-like organ. The body of the female is several inches long. Two of the tentacles of the female are broad and papery; they secrete a limy material by means of which the female nautilus builds a thin, papery shell or pouch about the lower part of her body in which to carry the young. These specialized tentacles not only provide the material, but serve as fingers to apply it in the making of the spiral, single-chambered shell. The sailors of the Mediterranean used to maintain that the paper nautilus hoisted these broad, thin, paper-making tentacles as sails and drifted before the wind . This fabled method of sailing and the confusion of common names led Holmes to write in his Chambered Nautilus: This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,-- The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea maids rise to sun their streaming hair. As a matter of fact, the two tentacles in question clasp the shell in navigation. The six others trail in the shelter, while the body, shell and all, is propelled backward by a jet of water driven out through the siphon tube. The shell or egg case has no organic connection with the body. There can be no confusion between the beautiful shell of the cuttlefish called the paper Nautilus (Argonauta argo), and that of our type. For it is only the female Argonaut which bears a shell, it is not chambered, and is a shelter for the eggs--a cradle, not a house. It is usually stated to be formed by two of the arms, but it seems doubtful whether it is not in reality due to the activity of the mantle.--J. Arthur-Thompson. If we are very fortunate we shall see the paper nautilus, the most beautiful of all the mollusks. . . . . We may also see the animal leave the shell and move about, flushing a pale red, now a vivid blue. This is the animal that is supposed to raise its sails and float on the seas, "a thing of beauty and a joy forever." It is sad to break up these delightful fables, but the sail merely clings to the shell, and the shell is merely the egg-case or float for the strange creature.--Chas. F. Holder. Learn of the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale. --Pope. Navajo (na'va-ho) Indians, a tribe of natives closely related to the Apaches. They have dwelt for centuries in the arid country of northwestern Arizona. At various dates they have given trouble to the surrounding tribes and to the settlers, both Spanish and American. During the Civil War and soon afterward they were severely punished by Kit Carson, the Indian fighter. Efforts were made to remove them to the eastward, but they have been settled finally on a reservation of over 9,000,000 acres lying at the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico , and Utah. They now number about 16,000, but there is a large intermixture of Pueblo, Shoshonean, Yuman, and Spanish blood. Crops are raised in the sandy soil along the streams. Horses, cattle, and flocks of sheep and goats are pastured on the uplands. An ancient art of weaving has been developed into an important village industry. The women weave the wool of the flocks on primitive hand looms, producing blankets, rugs, belts, garters, and saddle girths in a variety of bright colors and patterns. Red, black, white, yellow, and blue are favorite colors. Genuine navajo blankets are homespun, and are dyed with native plants and minerals--sumac, ochre, and pinon. They are woven so hard and tight as to be waterproof. Cotton warp, yarn, and aniline dyes are now sold to the weavers in quantity. Navajo blankets, in particular, are in demand for decorative purposes. Curio dealers ask from $1 to $100 for specimens of rugs and blankets. The industry brings in from $100,000 to $200,000 a year. Many of the men are skilled in hammering silver decorations. The cultivated lands are chiefly garden patches devoted to the raising of corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, peaches and apricots, and a little wheat. The Navajo house is usually a sod hut supported on sticks. When a death occurs, the family moves out, the props are pulled away, and the earth drops in and buries the dead. Several government and mission schools are maintained and efforts are made to encourage habits of industry and thrift. See Indian; Apache ; Blanket
Nautilus The Chambered
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
The Chambered, a pearly-shelled mollusks. It is related, not closely, to the octopus, and yet more distantly to the snail. The shell of this nautilus is a flat coil like that of a land snail. The foot or muscular body, occupying the mouth of the shell, is divided into about forty tentacles. There are two eyes. The mouth is provided with a hardened beak like that of a snail. There is no ink sac. The chambered nautilus lives on the floors of the seas about New Guinea and the Philippines at a depth of from 325 to 2,300 feet. It swims by ejecting a jet of water, but it does not sail at the surface of the sea by hoisting a sail to catch the breeze. It feeds on deep sea mollusks, which it holds in its tentacles while it extracts the contents of the shell with its rasping tongue. The chambered nautilus has a beautiful pearly shell of remarkable construction. The coiled shell is divided into chambers by cross partitions. A cut before the writer shows thirty chambers, each larger than its predecessor. The animal lives in the outer, the newest, largest chamber. The chambers are connected by a slender tube or siphuncle, coiling backward through the partitions to the original chamber. This siphuncle contains and is a part of the living animal, so that it is not exact, from a scientific point of view, to say that any part of the shell has been abandoned. There are many fossil species, among which the ammonites may be named. A straight-shelled nautilus of bygone ages is called the Orthoceras from two Greek words meaning straight. The poet Holmes has made beautiful use of the peculiar manner of growth in his poem The Chambered Nautilus: Year after year behind silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! The shells of the pearly nautilus (Nautilus pompilius) are common on the shores of warm seas, but the animals are very rare. Naturalists do not seem to know how to get them, though the natives of Fiji and New Hebrides, who appreciate their flesh, trap them successfully in lobster pots baited with crustacean or sea urchin. The animal creeps or swims gently along the bottom at no great depth, and its appearance on the surface, "floating like a tortoiseshell cat," is probably the result of storms. It is called "pearly" on account of the appearance of the innermost layer of the shell. This is exposed after the soft organic stratum and the median layer which bears bands of colour have been worn away, or dissolved in a dolphin's stomach, or artificially treated with acid. The beautiful shell is a spiral in one plane, divided into a set of chambers, in the last of which the animal lives, while the others contain gas. The young creature inhabits a tiny shell curved like a horn; it grows too big for this, and proceeds to enlarge its dwelling, meanwhile drawing itself forward in the older part, and forming a door of lime behind it. This process is repeated again and again; as an addition is made in front, the animal draws itself forward a little, and shuts off a part of the chamber in which it has been living. The compartments seen on a divided shell are not exactly successive chambers, they are fractions of successive chambers abandoned and partitioned off as more space was gained in front. Moreover, all the compartments are in communication by a median tube of skin--the siphuncle--which is in part calcareous. It has been suggested, that "each septum shutting off an air-containing chamber is formed during a period of quiescence, probably after the reproductive act, when the visceral mass of the nautilus may be slightly shrunk, and gas is secreted from the dorsal integument so as to fill up the space previously occupied by the animal." Female cuttlefish. Nautilus and cuttlefish Chambered nautilus. Nautilus
Nautilus in ordinary language
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in ordinary language, a name popularly applied to two very different animals: the paper nautilus-the nautilus of poets, hich belongs to the ① ② ④ © **** *** *** 1. Admiral of the Navy 5. Commodore 2. Admiral 6. Captain 3. Vice-Admiral 7. Commander (Silver Leaf) 4. Rear-Admiral 8. Lieutenant-Commander (Gold Leaf) genus Argonauta (see ARGONAUT), and not to nautilus; and to the pearly nautilus (N. pompilius), for a long period the only known species. In zoölogy, the typical and only recent genus of the family 1 Nautilidæ. The shell is involute, with an outer porcellaneous and an inner nacreous layer.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 writer was right to break up the sailing fable, and right to doubt the old story that the paper nautilus's shell is made by two arms only in part: modern work confirms the shell is secreted by the flattened webs of the female's dorsal arms, but its purpose was settled only in 2010, when Australian researchers filmed Argonauta gulping air at the surface and sealing it inside the shell to hold itself neutrally buoyant ot merely a cradle for eggs. The chambered nautilus is now known to carry roughly ninety tentacles rather than the "about forty" given here, and Allonautilus scrobiculatus, a second living genus, was photographed alive off Papua New Guinea in 2015 after decades unseen. The biggest change is in the animals' prospects: heavy fishing for the pearly shells that Holmes made famous led all Nautilus species to be placed on CITES Appendix II in 2016, restricting international trade in a creature the 1910 account treated as an inexhaustible curiosity.
Written for this edition, 2026.