LECTURE X. 
137 
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 im- 
mediately 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 
ISIr. Pennant, unworthy of a sober naturalist. It 
is certain however that a great variety of apppr 
rently authentic evidences seem to confirm the 
reality of this account. The ancients, it is evi- 
dent, acknowledged the existence of animals of 
the Cuttle-Fish tribe of a most enormous sizej 
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 
Carteia, 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 fasten- 
ers 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 Itardly be 
