178 Fish Stories 



may be a mixed metaphor, but so is the subject of which it 

 treats. 



But the giant squid breaks the record for animal propensi- 

 ties. As we know the creature, sixty or seventy feet long, 

 it has a beak something like that of a parrot, opening two 

 or three inches. It is a slow nipper, and cannot swallow 

 anything that would not pass through the beak of a hawk or 

 an eagle. 



But the naturalist of the literary Porch Club tells us of 

 a giant squid, lying on the bottom (as only an octopus or a 

 nature fakir can lie) which devoured two basking sharks, 

 each six or eight feet long (though none of less than thirty 

 feet are in any museum). Besides these, it swallowed a 

 saw-fish ten feet long, a feat a giant squid could not accom- 

 plish in a year, even if it were omnipresent ; for the basking 

 shark breeds in the Arctic Ocean, and the saw-fish in the 

 tropic gulfs. They are never near neighbors, save in the 

 stomach of a squid, on the seventh floor back, in New York 

 City. 



But this was merely the sharpening of the appetite ; next 

 comes a swordfish seven feet long. It is grasped by a ten- 

 tacle, and " the squid hauls the swordfish down and crams 

 it into its cavernous mouth." There is nothing like exact- 

 ness in figures. Briareus of the hundred arms, and Argus 

 equally well fixed for eyes, offer similar models of precision. 

 The swordfish was seven feet long, and the squid's horrible 

 mouth must have averaged seven feet wide. 



The writer has played with the giant squid, when it has 

 been safely caught and in alcohol. In a specimen forty feet 

 long he could barely force two of his fingers into the mouth. 

 One twice as long could not take in a man's hand. It mat- 

 ters not what Professor Verrill of Yale, the highest author- 

 ity on squids, may think. It matters nothing for figures 

 and measurements in exact government reports. It matters 

 not, that of all large animals, the giant squid has, perchance, 

 the narrowest gullet. It matters not that we outdo Jonah 



