144 



THE SEA. 



languished, or which may linger or languish, of the slow and feeble creation whose fecundity 

 had encumbered the globe. 



" In the more ancient formations of the Old World we find two murderers a nipper and 

 a sucker. The first is revealed to us by the imprint of the trilobite, 

 an order now lost, the most destructive of extinct beings. The 



* O 



second subsists in one gigantic fragment, a beak nearly two feet in 



length, which was that of a great sucker, or cuttle-fish (sepia). If 



we may judge from such a beak, this monster if the other parts of 



the body were in proportion must have been enormous ; its ventose 



invincible arms, of perhaps twenty or thirty feet, like those of some 



monstrous spider. In making war on the molluscs he remains 



mollusc also ; that is to say, always an embryo. He presents the 



strange almost ridiculous, if it were not also terrible appearance 



of an embryo going to war ; of a foetus 

 furious and cruel, soft and transparent, 

 but tenacious, breathing with a mur- 

 derous breath for it is not for food 

 alone that it makes war : it has the 

 wish to destroy. Satiated, and even MUEEX. 



bursting, it still destroys. Without 



defensive armour, under its threatening murmurs there is 

 no peace; its safety is to attack. It regards all creatures 

 as a possible enemy. It throws about its long arms, or 

 rather thongs, armed with suckers, at 

 random/' 



Victor Hugo's description of the 

 monster, the devil-fish (or octopus), with 



whom poor Gilliatt has that terrible encounter, will not fade from the 



mind of any one who has once read it. The poet-novelist tells us 



that he founded his narration on facts that came under his own 



notice. "Near Breck-Hou, in Sark," says he, "they show a cave 



whei-e a devil-fish, a few years since, seized and drowned a lobster- 

 fisher. . . . He who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes, 



at Sark, in the cavern called the Boutiques, a pieuvre (cuttle-fish) 



swimming, and pursuing a bather. When captured and killed, this 



specimen was found to be four English feet broad, and one could count 



its four hundred suckers. The monster thrust them out convulsively, 



in the agony of death/' 



Hugo's wonderful description of the monster, though often techni- 

 cally wrong, principally from exaggeration, must have some place here. 



of nature with the appreciation of the artist rather than of the scientist. 



" It is difficult," writes he, " for those who have not seen it to believe in the 



existence of the devil-fish. Compared to this creature the ancient hydras are insignifi- 



STROMBUS. 



TRITON. 



He grasps the facts 



