CUTTLE, OR INK-FISH. SGl 



they also possess, like the polypi of modern natural history, a con- 

 siderable degree of reproductive power; being often seen with limbs 

 which have evidently been mutilated, and have reproduced. 



The eight-armed and common cuttle-fish are numbered among 

 the edible marine animals, and are still used in many parts of' 

 Europe as a food. With the Romans they seem to have been consi- 

 dered as a delicacy. When boiled, they assume a red or deep sal- 

 mon-colour, especially when salted. The Greeks, as well as the Ro- 

 mans, are known to have been in the habit of using the cuttle as a 

 food i and it has been supposed, and surely not without a consider- 

 able degree of probability, that the celebrated plain, but wholesome 

 dish, the black broth of Sparta, was no other than a kind of cuttle, 

 fish soup, in which the black liquor of the animal was always 

 added as an ingredient ; being, when recent, of a very agreeable 

 taste. 



Mr. Pennant, in the fourth volume of his British Zoology, speak. 

 iug of the eight-armed cuttle, tells us, he has been well assured from 

 persons worthy of credit, that in the Indian seas this species has 

 been found of such a size as to measure two fathoms in breadth 

 across the central part, while each arm has measured nine fathoms 

 in length; and that the natives of the Indian isles, when sailing in 

 their canoes, always take care to be provided with hatchets, in order 

 to cut off immediately the arms of such of those animals as happen 

 to fling them over the sides of the canoe, lest they should pull it 

 under water and sink it. This has been considered as a piece of 

 credulity in Mr. Pennant, unworthy of a sober naturalist. It is cer- 

 tain, however, that a great variety of apparent authentic evidences 

 seem to confirm the reality of this account. The ancients, it is 

 evident, acknowledged the existence of animals of the cuttle-fish 

 tribe of a most enormous size ; witness the account given by Pliny 

 and others of the large polypus as he terms it, which used to rob 

 the repositories of salt-fish on the coasts of Carteria, and which, 

 according to his description, had a head of the size of a cask that 

 would hold fifteen amphorae ; arms measuring thirty feet in length, 

 of such a diameter that a man could hardly clasp one of them, and 

 beset with suckers or fasteners of the size of large basins that would 

 hold four or five gallons apiece. The existence, in short, of some 

 enormously large species of the cuttle-fish tribe, in the Indian and 

 northern seas, can hardly be doubted ; and though some accounts 



