io6 THE OCTOPUS. 



with axes and knives, but he died delirious on the following night. 

 The captain tried to save the other two sailors by killing the 

 animal, and drove several harpoons into it ; but they broke away, 

 and the men were carried down by the monster. The arm cut off 

 was said to have been 25 feet long, and as thick as themizenyard, 

 and to have had on it suckers as big as saucepan-lids. I believe 

 the old sea-captain's narrative of the incident to be true : the 

 dimensions given by De Montfort are an embellishment of his own. 



It is remarkable that there exists in the East a strong belief in the 

 power of these animals to sink a ship and devour her crew. I 

 have been told by a friend that he saw in a shop in China a pic- 

 ture of a cuttlefish embracing a junk, apparently of about 300 

 tons burthen, and helping itself to the sailors, as one picks 

 gooseberries off a bush. Mr. Laurence Oliphant, in his " China 

 and Japan," describes a Japanese show, which consisted of " a 

 series of groups of figures carved in wood, the size of life, and as 

 cleverly coloured as Madame Tussaud's wax-works. One of these 

 was a group of women bathing in the sea. One of them had 

 been caught in the folds of a cuttle-fish ; the others, in alarm, 

 were escaping, leaving their companion to her fate. The cuttle- 

 iish was represented on a huge scale, its eyes, eyelids, and mouth 

 being made to move simultaneously by a man inside the head." 



The old stories of colossal cuttle-fishes, though gross exaggera- 

 tions, are "founded on facts." They are based on the rare 

 ■occurrence of specimens, smaller certainly, but still enormous, of 

 some known species. The means of observation on the duration 

 of growth and Hfe in the cej^halopods have been, of course, diffi- 

 cult to obtain ; but, from watching the rate of increase of size in 

 young specimens, De Ferussac, D'Orbigny, and other naturalists 

 have arrived at the conclusion that they sometimes live for many 

 years, and continue to grow till the end of their lives. That some 

 of them, therefore, should attain to a considerable magnitude is 

 Jiardly surprising. 



Passing over the earlier records of the appearance of cuttle- 



