io8 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



It is in the ranks of the two-gilled cuttlefishes that we discover 

 those phases of cuttlefish life which most characteristically appeal to 

 the popular mind. Thus, many species of two-gilled cuttles are eaten 

 and considered dainties by foreign nations ; it is from this group that 

 the sepia colour already mentioned is obtained \ their internal shells 

 gave us the "pounce" of long ago, and formed an article in the 

 materia medica of bygone days and, lastly, it is in this group that 

 the mythical and the real meet in the consideration of the giant 

 cuttlefishes which the myth and fiction of the past postulated, and 

 which modern zoology numbers among its realities. 



Tales of giant cuttlefishes are plentifully scattered through the 

 pages of classic and mediaeval narrators. Pliny and ^Elian mention 

 cuttles of huge size as having devastated the fishings on the Medi- 

 terranean coasts. The Scandinavian legends teem with giant cuttle- 

 fishes. Pontopiddan the younger, Bishop of Bergen, if not the 

 inventor of the legend concerning the " Kraken " or colossal poulpe, 

 perpetuated the story of this giant cuttlefish which seized ships 

 in its capacious embrace and destroyed fleets by the score. Denys 

 de Montfort, a French naturalist, in a zoological work depicts the 

 Kraken at work. It is demolishing a three-masted vessel in a style 

 eminently calculated to impress the uninitiated with a due sense of its 

 power ; whilst it was this same De Montfort who, from the other side of 

 the Channel, started the story of the destruction of a British convoy and 

 six captured French men-of-war by the herculean cephalopod the 

 facts of the case, including the safe arrival of the ships at Jamaica, 

 unfortunately for the ingenious raconteur, directly contradicting his 

 essay in zoological fable. One may pass by the narrative of Dens, 

 a trader of Dunkirk also told by De Montfort in which a giant 

 cuttlefish rose from the sea depths, when Dens's vessel lay between 

 St. Helena and Cape Negro, and seized three of his sailors. An 

 arm of the animal was cut off in valiant defence, and De Montfort 

 gives its length at 25 feet. But whilst Dens's narrative may have 

 been founded on fact, as recent circumstances prove, there seems 

 little doubt that to De Montfort it owed considerable embellishment. 

 Leaving these exaggerations to the fate which posterity invariably 

 reserves for them, we may next note that in the records of zoology, 

 dating from eighty years back, we meet here and there with instances 

 in which the actual remains of giant cuttles were encountered. 

 Peron, Quoy, and Gaimard, Captain Cook, Lander, Rang, and 

 others, detail cases in which cuttlefishes exceeding greatly all ordi- 

 nary species in size were seen and examined. In 1867, a French 

 war-steamer, when between Teneriffe and Madeira, encountered a 

 giant squid nearly 20 feet long in body alone and without estimating 

 the length of the arms. Within the past few years, however, a large 

 number of specimens of giant cuttlefishes have been met with on the 



