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Cephalopoda   Listen
noun
Cephalopoda  n. pl.  (Zool.) The highest class of Mollusca. Note: They have, around the front of the head, a group of elongated muscular arms, which are usually furnished with prehensile suckers or hooks. The head is highly developed, with large, well organized eyes and ears, and usually with a cartilaginous brain case. The higher forms, as the cuttlefishes, squids, and octopi, swim rapidly by ejecting a jet of water from the tubular siphon beneath the head. They have a pair of powerful horny jaws shaped like a parrot's beak, and a bag of inklike fluid which they can eject from the siphon, thus clouding the water in order to escape from their enemies. They are divided into two orders, the Dibranchiata, having two gills and eight or ten sucker-bearing arms, and the Tetrabranchiata, with four gills and numerous arms without suckers. The latter are all extinct except the Nautilus. See Octopus, Squid, Nautilus.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cephalopoda" Quotes from Famous Books



... distributed through the medium in which life exists, and where the limits of variation are consequently small, the constitutional nutritive tendency of the female manifests itself in size. Among many Cephalopoda and Cirripedia, and among certain of the Articulata, the female is larger than the male. Female spiders, bees, wasps, hornets, and butterflies are larger than the males, and the difference is noticeable even in the larval stage. So considerable is the difference in ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... the Ascidian are developed in the walls of the cavity in question; and an aquiferous chamber of smaller dimensions has the same relation to the kidney in Lamellibranchiata—in Gasteropoda, Heteropoda, Pteropoda, and dibranchiate Cephalopoda. But although such is likely enough to be the case, we do not know at present that the aquiferous chambers in any of the last named mollusks attain an extension similar to that which obtains ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various

... stand the cuttle-fishes, forming (with the Nautilus and many extinct animals, such as ammonites and their allies) the great class Cephalopoda. The Cephalopoda, such as the cuttle-fish (Sepia) and the Poulp (Octopus), have now become familiar objects through our aquaria, where their very eccentric forms and remarkable movements naturally attract attention. To this group also belongs Spirula, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... the last representative of the Cephalopoda with partitioned shells, the Nautilus of the Southern Seas, remains faithful to the ancient design; it has not improved upon its distant predecessors. It has altered the position of the siphuncle, has placed it in the centre instead of leaving it on the back, but it still whirls its spiral ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... all Cephalous Mollusca, i.e., all Cephalopoda, Gasteropoda, and Lamellibranchiata, be only modifications by excess or defect of the parts of a definite archetype, then, I think, it follows as a necessary consequence, that no anamorphosis takes ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell



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