Second in importance to fish are the various varieties of edible shellfish and other soft bodied inhabitants of the sea—mussels and clams and sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and octopuses. The flesh of the octopus or “devil-fish,” though not an important article of food, was considered quite a dainty, and feasts were often given in which it figured as a special feature, like crab apples or like the apples or oranges of present-day feasts. Far more important than these mushy foods, though probably subsidiary, on the whole, to salmon and other fish, was the flesh of sea mammals—the humpbacked whale, the California whale, the sea otter, the sea lion, and, most important of all, the hair seal.