738 THE UNIVERSE. 



this creature ; he delineates it, and in his engravings we 

 see the reptile issuing from the waves, and launching itself 

 upon the ships in order to devour the crews. 1 



Elsewhere the Bishop of Upsala represents Cetacea which 

 crush ships in thdir formidable jaws ! 



And yet, though it seems incredible, our epoch, in respect 

 to the history of marine monsters, leaves the old legends of 

 the Middle Aores and of the Renaissance far behind. In 

 fact it is impossible to dream of anything more fabulous 

 than what Denis de Montfort in comparatively recent times 

 gave out as a feast for the credulous. His mind must really 

 have been diseased. 



The lucubrations of this naturalist have found a place in 

 the great edition of BufTon's works. He there states, with- 

 out the least hesitation, that in the northern seas there are 

 cuttle-fish of such a size that a whale is a pigmy in compar- 

 ison with them. According to him, those molluscs are even 

 of such prodigious dimensions that when they rest motion- 

 less and half out of the water their bodies, which ages have 

 covered with tufts of marine plants, have sometimes been 

 taken for islands floating on the surface of the waves. It 

 is even related in some old Scandinavian chronicles that 



1 " The old Scandinavian writers attribute to the sea-serpent a length of 600 

 feet, with a head closely resembling that of a horse, black eyes, and a kind of 

 white mane. According to them it is only met with in the ocean, where it sud- 

 denly rears itself up like a mast of a ship-of-the-line, and gives vent to hissing 

 noises, which appal the hearer, like the tempest roar. The Norwegian poets com- 

 pare its progress to the flight of a swift arrow. When the fishermen descry it 

 they row in the direction of the sun, the monster being unable to see them when 

 its head is turned towards that planet. They say that it revolves sometimes in a 

 circle around the doomed vessel, whose crew thus find themselves assailed on every 

 side." The Mysteries of the Ocean, by Mangin. Tr. 



