THE KRAKEN. -367 



narratives of those who have told us they have seen what 

 we have not. Portions of cuttles of extraordinary size are 

 preserved in several European museums. In the collection 

 of, the Faculty of Sciences at Montpellier is one six feet 

 long, taken by fishermen at Cette, which Professor Steen- 

 striip has identified as Ommastrephes pteropus. One of the 

 same species, which was formerly in the possession of M. 

 Eschricht, who received it from Marseilles, may be seen in 

 the museum at Copenhagen. The body of another, 

 analogous to these, is exhibited in the Museum of Trieste : 

 it was taken on the coast of Dalmatia. At the meeting of 

 the British Association at Plymouth in 1841, Colonel Smith 

 exhibited drawings of the beak and other parts of a very 

 large calamary preserved at Haarlem ; and M. P. Harting, 

 in 1860, described in the Memoirs of the Royal Scientific 

 Academy of Amsterdam portions of two extant in other 

 collections in Holland, one of which he believes to be Steen- 

 strup's Architeuthis dux> a species which he regards as 

 identical with Ommastrephes todarus of D'Orbigny. 



Still there remained a residuum of doubt in the minds of 

 naturalists and the public concerning the existence of 

 gigantic cuttles until, towards the close of the year 1873, 

 two specimens were encountered on the coast of New- 

 foundland, and a portion of one and the whole of the other 

 were brought ashore, and preserved for examination by 

 competent zoologists. 



The circumstances under which the first was seen, as 

 sensationally described by the Rev. Moses Harvey, Presby- 

 terian minister of St. John's, Newfoundland, in a letter to 

 Principal Dawson, of McGill College, were, briefly and 

 soberly, as follows : Two fishermen were out in a small 

 punt on the 26th of October, 1873, near the eastern end of 

 Belle Isle, Conception Bay, about nine miles from St. John's. 



