296 . SUPPLEMENT 
the northern romancers concerning their kraken. Denys de 
Montfort, in his history of the mollusca, has thought proper to 
collect all that was written before his time upon this subject, 
but he has not limited himself there. Thanks to the usual 
fertility of his imagination, he has arrived to such a point of 
exaggeration, that although he boasted of having made na- 
turalists believe whatever he pleased, he has failed in per- 
suading any body to adopt the history of the kraken. It was 
about the same time when this author wrote, that they began 
to speak in the United States with so much assurance con- 
cerning the colossal sea-serpent, which turned out after all to 
be nothing but a tunny of ten or twelve feet long. 
The ancients tell us that the octopi are the enemies of the 
locusts and of the lobsters, which dread them, while they are 
themselves pursued by the murznz, which devour their arms. 
They likewise inform us that their bite is stronger than that 
of the sepiz, but not so venomous. -#lian adds, that it is 
said by fishermen that the octopi are attracted to the land by 
the fruit of the olive-tree. 
The octopi do not seem to be very hurtful to the human 
species, except by the destruction of such crustacea as serve 
for our nutriment. The mode in which these animals twist 
themselves, with the assistance of their arms, provided with 
suckers, and the force with which they do this, is the cause of 
the horror which a man experiences, who, at the moment in 
which he is swimming in the sea, finds himself thus enlaced 
and in peril of drowning. 
In many countries some species of octopi are eaten. The 
ancients appear to have held them in request; and even at 
the present day, in the Mediterranean, and particularly the 
isles of Greece, sailors eat a considerable quantity of them. 
But it appears that their flesh is always much harder than 
that of the calamary or loligo, and that it even requires to be 
