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The chapter describes the geology, oceanography, and patterns of biogeography of the California kelp forests. The structure and biodiversity of the kelp forest food web for all trophic guilds is described as well as findings from experimental manipulations and long time series studies. The chapter finishes with a discussion of the role of fishing, habitat loss, and climate change on these kelp forests.

This chapter is an account of a whole brain preparation that has enabled for the first time to dye-fill, and record intracellularly from, cells in the brain of Octopus. Over a hundred cells in the posterior chromatophore lobes of nearly 50 octopuses were penetrated. Most cells were spontaneously active, firing at 1–12 Hz, some were silent and others showed regular bursting activity. Lucifer Yellow fills confirmed that many cells in this lobe are unusual by invertebrate standards in having cell body ‘dendrites’ as well as axonal processes with branches. Many cells are also dye-coupled. This new preparation could be modified for longlasting intracellular recording in many lobes of the brain of semi-intact cephalopods. Perfused, isolated brains have yielded some information about the electrical properties of large cells in the sub-oesophageal lobes, and activity in some of these cells has been correlated with ventilatory activity of the mantle in semi-intact, perfused preparations, but these preparations are short lived and the supraoesophageal lobes rapidly lose vascular flow. Brain slice techniques are now being applied with great success to the cephalopod central nervous system, but these are not suitable for neuroethological studies. The chapter concentrates on the chromatophore system of semi-intact octopuses, as this has been well characterized and the posterior chromatophore lobes are readily accessible.

This chapter describes the multiple matrices in the memory system of octopus. The capacity to set up and hold the memory is distributed among many distinct matrices. This distribution implies that each area contributes a part of the whole and the record is also distributed within each part. The results of removing individual lobes or parts of them in an octopus have shown that the memory is indeed distributed in this way. Each matrix of the sequence plays a different part in the whole process but none is uniquely essential. Such a system provides the characteristics that are necessary for a useful memory. It allows for fault tolerance, generalization, and completion; that is, recognition of situations in spite of their variations. Organization of numerous channels into a series of matrices is a method of achieving those results given the properties of nervous tissues. The systems in Octopus for visual and touch learning are distinct but have some overlap. In the visual system the impulses from groups of retinal receptors are passed through the optic lobes and then a series of four further matrices of intersecting axons. With appropriate synaptic changes these form associations between conjunctions of signals of visual events and their consequences, producing attack or retreat. The touch memory consists primarily of four matrices, but the tactile impulses from the arms also have access to the visual centers so that no less than eight centers are involved. Injury to any of them reduces the accuracy of learned discriminations of rough and smooth objects.

This chapter examines the Mussel Slough Affair, which involved the Southern Pacific Company and the rival claimants to its lands. It studies the “Octopus” Myth, a fictional account of the Battle of Mussel Slough, the most notorious conflict between the Southern Pacific and the rival claimants to its lands. The chapter then lists the six core elements of a traditional account of the Battle of Mussel Slough. The legal origins of the dispute, the movement of hundreds of squatters into land owned by the Southern Pacific, and the efforts of the Southern Pacific to reach a compromise with the squatters are discussed in detail. The chapter considers the Settlers' Grand League, which was aimed at resisting the supposed railroad lands of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in the Mussel Slough District. It concludes with a discussion of the eviction of the squatters, and of the Battle of Mussel Slough and its aftermath.

My paper reads Canto 29 as a poem informed by Pound’s life in the early 1920s, a time when he was getting to grips with revolutions in his understanding both of economic and sexual values. The canto’s satire on contemporary bourgeois life seems to undercut some of the metaphysical themes upon which Pound relied elsewhere in the epic, and this ambivalence extends to his treatment of women, seen both as enabling channels of intellectual value, and as potential obstructors of Pound’s generative virtù. This essay considers some of the symptoms of Pound’s attempt to get to grips with this new configuration of values, with particular focus on his shifting attitudes to Neoplatonism and sexual politics.

This chapter examines artifacts of modified coral from Nuʻalolo Kai. There are few substantial coral colonies inshore at Nuʻalolo Kai, an indication of the heavy wave action experienced by the coastline during the winter months. The corals that have been documented inshore include Porites lobata and Montipora patula. Corals are present at deeper depths, such as Pocillopora meandrina, Porites lobata, Pavona duerdeni, and the soft coral Palythoa tuberculosa. Using techniques that focus on wear patterns and morphology, this chapter analyzes several assemblages of coral artifacts from the 1958–1964 Bishop Museum Nuʻalolo Kai collection, including coral files, coral octopus lure weights, conically shaped coral artifacts, and coral discoids. It also considers the distribution of coral files and coral abraders throughout the stratigraphic deposits of Nuʻalolo Kai, along with various coral traits produced by manufacture and attrition. Finally, the chapter discusses the frequency of coral tools at Nuʻalolo Kai.

This chapter focuses on the creation and expansion of the Southern Railway corporation and the ways in which the corporation overcame anti-monopoly sentiment in the South. While the company styled itself as an embodiment of the New South, northern capitalist J.P. Morgan financed its reorganization, and its expansion engendered resistance in Georgia and North Carolina. This chapter traces the origins of this company in the economic depression and wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1890s and notes the attempts to brand this new company as a southern enterprise under the leadership of its first president Samuel Spencer. The chapter then traces resistance to the new company in Georgia and North Carolina, two states in which the Southern Railway tried to purchase other railroads. Foes of the railroad, which formed a broad coalition of Populists, Democrats, and other anti-monopolists, labelled the road as an “octopus” for its monopolistic tendencies. In two case study states – Georgia and North Carolina – appeals to white supremacy and elections marked with violence, as in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, defeated the anti-monopoly critique and preserved the power and size of the Southern Railway.

How do you know what a corporate person is really intending, whoever exactly that person is? This chapter explores a set of initial answers to this question in philosophies of intention like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, in historical political cartoons of the corporation, in legal theories of contracts, and in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the influential novel about the railroad colossus known as the Southern Pacific. Together, they fill out the problem of collective social intention both as it was understood around the turn of the twentieth century and how it developed subsequently. Although older accounts of contract appeal to intention (“a meeting of minds”), the corporate form’s lack of inner life and composite quality made such a mind-meeting odd to envision. The difficulty of knowing a corporate person’s meaning raised knotty issues of interpretation, and political cartoons provided a popular attempt to work through these issues. Other thinkers, including law professor Ernst Freund and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., resolved these problems in their theories of corporate contracts, which introduced a larger concern of how to interpret any of a corporation’s signs. This issue occupied philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce, and later scholars of contracts such as Arthur Corbin. Ultimately, an attempt to resolve a particular problem of corporate contracts led to a semiological theory committed to the simple literality of signs, in order to negotiate how to live with collective beings without obvious or singular minds.