COLOSSAL CUTTLEFISHES. 89 
than eight feet long. Rang, in the same part of the world, met a 
cephalopod with a reddish body, which was the size of a ton cask. 
Swediaur reports that some whalers took out of the mouth of a 
whale pieces of a cuttlefish which were twenty-five feet long. On 
the 30th of November, 1861, the steam corvette Alecton, while 
cruising between Teneriffe and Madeira, encountered a monster 
cephalopod floating on the surface of the water. It was sixteen 
or eighteen feet long, irrespective of the eight long arms. The 
body was fusiform and weighed upwards of four thousand pounds. 
It is doubtful whether this creature was a true cuttlefish or not, 
but as its body is said to be fusiform and terminated in two fleshy 
lobes or fins, the two long arms may have been eaten off. The 
poulpes or octopods have no fins, and the body is a rounded mass, 
as seen in the adjoining figure, which represents a true octopus (a 
Fig. 9. 
Brazilian species), so that this was probably a cuttlefish. 
I have been informed by Capt. J. Hammond of Salem, who has 
sailed for forty-one years between that port and the East Indies, 
that once, while off the Cape of Good Hope, he saw the remains of 
Squid from eight to ten cubic feet in size, floating on the surface. 
The animal had apparently been attacked by whales and dolphins, 
and the arms and head devoured. . 
At a late meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, 
Hon. N. E. Atwood related the fact that he had seen pieces of 
squid ten inches in diameter vomited up by a sperm whale, and 
that sperm whales were known to devour giant squid. I have re- 
