486 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



often causing them to founder at sea, while the cause of shipwreck 

 remained unsuspected. Denis de Montfort gives a description and 

 representation of this Kraken, which he calls the Colossal Poulpe, in 

 which the creature is made to embrace a three-masted ship in its vast 

 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, 

 hi 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 insulse quam bestiae," 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 Sepia 

 microcosmos. In subsequent editions, however, 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 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 fishermen 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, accord- 

 ing to their calculations, must have weighed 200 pounds. M. Rang 

 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. 



