350 SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED. 



" poulpes " (octopods), leaving his son in charge of the 

 canoe. After a short time he rose to the surface, his arms 

 free, but his nostrils and mouth completely covered by a 

 large octopus. If his son had not promptly torn the 

 living plaister from off his face he must have been suffo- 

 cated a fate which actually befel, some years previously, a 

 man who foolishly went diving alone. 



In Appleton's American Journal of Science and Art, 

 January 3ist, 1874, a correspondent describes an attack 

 by an octopus on a diver who was at work on the wreck of 

 a sunken steamer off the coast of Florida. The man, a power- 

 ful Irishman, was helpless in its grasp, and would have been 

 drowned if he had not been quickly brought to the surface ; 

 for, when dragged on to the raft from which he had 

 descended, he fainted, and his companions were unable to 

 pull the creature from its hold upon him until they had 

 dealt it a sharp blow across its baggy body. 



A similar incident occurred to the Government diver of 

 the Colony of Victoria, Australia. Whilst pursuing his 

 avocation in the estuary of the river Moyne he was seized 

 by an octopus. He killed it by striking it with an iron 

 bar, and brought to shore with him a portion of it with the 

 arms more than three feet long. 



Mr. Laurence Oliphant, in his * China and Japan,' describes 

 a Japanese show, which consisted of " a series of groups 

 of figures carved in wood, the size of life, and as cleverly 

 coloured as Madame Tussaud's wax-works. One of these 

 was a group of women bathing in the sea. One of them 

 had been caught in the folds of a cuttle-fish ; the others, 

 in alarm, were escaping, leaving their companion to her 

 fate. The cuttle-fish was represented on a huge scale, its 

 eyes, eyelids, and mouth being made to move simultane- 

 ously by a man inside the head." 



