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, 
in Norway, in one of his ‘books assures us that a whole regiment of 
soldiers could easily manceuvre on the back of the Kraken, which he 
compares to a floating island. “ Similior insulze quam bestiz,” wrote 
the good Bishop of Bergen. 
In the first edition of his “System of Nature,” Linnzus himself 
admits the existence of this colossus of the seas, which he calls Sepza 
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. Péron, the 
naturalist, met in the Australian seas a outtle-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. 
