CEPHALOPODS. 461 



arms. Delighted with the success which his representation met with, 

 Denis laughed at the credulity of his contemporaries. " If my Kraken 

 takes with them," he said, " I shall make it extend its arms to both 

 shores of the Straits of Gibraltar." To another learned friend he 

 said, "If my entangled ship is accepted, I shall make my Poulpe 

 overthrow a whole fleet." 



Among those who admitted the facetious history of the Kraken 

 without a smile, there was at least one holy bishop, who was, more- 

 over, something of a naturalist. Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, 

 in Norway, in one of his books assures us that a whole regiment of 

 soldiers could easily manoeuvre on the back of the Kraken, which he 

 compares to a floating island. " Similior insulae quan bestise," wrote 

 the good Bishop of Bergen. 



In the first edition of his " System of Nature," Linnaeus himself 

 admits the existence of this colossus of the seas, which he calls Sepias 

 microcosmos. Better informed in the following edition, he erased the 

 Kraken from his catalogue. 



The statements of Pliny respecting the Colossal Poulpe, like those 

 of Montfort about the Kraken, are evidently fabulous. It is, how- 

 ever, an undisputed fact that there exists in the Mediterranean and 

 other seas cuttle-fish a congenerous animal of considerable size. A 

 calmar has been caught in our own time, near Nice, which weighed 

 upwards of thirty pounds. In the same neighbourhood some fisher- 

 men caught, twenty years ago, an individual of the same genus nearly 

 six feet long, which is preserved in the Museum of Natural History 

 at Montpellier. Peron, the naturalist, met in the Australian seas a 

 cuttle-fish nearly eight feet long. The travellers Quoy and Gaimard 

 picked up in the Atlantic Ocean, near the Equator, the skeleton of a 

 monstrous mollusc, which, according to their calculations, must have 

 weighed two hundred pounds. M. Eung met, in the middle of the 

 ocean, a mollusc with short arms, and of a reddish colour, the body of 

 which, according to this naturalist, was as large as a tun cask. One 

 of the mandibles of this creature, still preserved in the Museum of the 

 College of Surgeons, is larger than a hand. 



In 1853 a gigantic cephalopod was stranded on the coast of Jut- 

 land. The body of this monster, which was dismembered by the 

 fishermen, furnished many wheelbarrow loads, its pharynx, or back 

 part of the mouth, alone being as large as the head of an infant. 



