THE KRAKEN. 
31 
come out of the sea at night, and carry off and devour 
salted tunnies from the curing depots on the shore ; and 
adds that when it was at last killed, the head of it (they 
used to call the body the head, because in swimming it 
goes in advance) was found to weigh 700 lbs. ^lian re- 
cords a similar incident, and describes his monster as 
crushing in its arms the barrels of salt fish to get at the 
contents. These two must have been octopods if they 
were anything ; the word " polypus " thus especially 
designates it, and moreover, the free-swimming cuttles and 
squids would be helpless if stranded on the shore. Some 
of the old writers seem to have aimed rather at making their 
histories sensational than at carefully investigating the 
credibility or the contrary of the highly coloured reports 
brought to them. These were, of course, gross exaggera- 
tions, but there was generally a substratum of truth in 
them. They were based on the rare occurrence of speci- 
mens, smaller certainly, but still enormous, of some known 
species, and in most cases the worst that can be said of 
their authors is that they were culpably careless and fool- 
ishly credulous. 
Unhappily so lenient a judgment cannot be passed on 
some comparatively recent writers. Denys de Montfort, 
half a century later than Pontoppidan, not only professed 
to believe in the Kraken, but also in the existence of 
another gigantic animal distinct from it ; a colossal poulpCy 
or octopus, compared with which Pliny's was a mere 
pigmy. In a drawing fitter to decorate the outside of a 
showman's caravan at a fair than seriously to illustrate a 
work on natural history,* he depicted this tremendous 
cuttle as throwing its arms over a three masted vessel, 
* * Histoire Naturelle gdn^rale et particuli^re des MoUusques,* 
vol. ii., p. 256. 
