6 
writers, as to the size they reach, sufficient proof was afforded to place their 
formidable bulk and voracity beyond question. The Kraken, that giant of 
Scandinavian romance, was a Cuttle Fish ; and the famous Terra Cottas in 
the Gregorian and the Vatican at Rome, show us Hercules strangling a great 
Cuttle Fish or Man Sucker ; for a sensational account, no modern naturalist 
can cap Victor Hugo's Devil Fish (as the Cuttles are called in the Channel 
Islands) — the description is related by him in the " Toilers of the Sea.'' 
The poetry of Aristotle'and the early Greeks, touching the Nautilus and 
Argonaut was examined face to face with prosaic facts, and attention drawn 
to the marine observations under water, established by the Emperor 
Napoleon III j " assistants being on the watch, ready to summon on the 
instant, the chief naturalist in charge. The author also mentioned the 
valuable assistance rendered by Madame Power, in Sicily, who had placed 
cages in the sea, in which she actually brought up the young Argonauts 
from the egg under her very eye, and noted their habits from day to day. 
Such was the transparency of the waters that wash the Sicilian shores, that 
M. Quarterages, on looking over the bow of a boat at sea there, fancied 
himself suspended in mid air. The writer touched on several curious points 
of structure, such as the eye, and its optical construction, and noticed the 
chameleon-like power that some foreign genera possess of changing their 
colour, and what is more extraordinary, their surface, changing a smooth 
skin, when irritated or excited, into a warty or tubercular coat. After 
adducing many other facts illustrative of the typical Cuttle Fish, the author 
briefly applied his previous descriptions to the elucidation of those that 
tenanted and built up the shells of the extinct Fossil genera, such as the 
Orthoceras of Silurian, the Clymenia of Devonian, and the Ammonite and 
Belemnite of the secondary formations, closing with an exordium in favour 
of theology and science going hand in hand, the one being a light to man's 
eyes, opening the mysteries of the universe, and the other " a lamp to his 
feet," leading him to the immaterial and eternal. 
V. 
The Typical Baces of Mankind. 
Illustrated by Casts of Crania in the Phrenological Museum of Edinburgh, 
lately presented to the Bristol Museum, by Dr, Charles H .Fox. 
By John Beddoe, M.D., President of the Anthropological Society, London. 
Dr. Beddoe remarked that the collection of skulls in the Edinburgh 
Museum, though small, was comprehensive, and that of the nine extant 
