CEPHALOPODS. 
457 
delates the history of an enormous cuttle-fish which haunted the coast 
°f Spain, and destroyed the fishing-grounds. He adds that this 
gigantic creature was finally taken, that its body weighed seven 
hundred pounds, and that its arms were ten yards in length. Its 
head came by right to Lucullus, to whose gastronomical privileges be 
all honour. It was so large, says Pliny, that it filled fifteen amphorae, 
and weighed seven hundred pounds also. 
Some naturalists of the Renaissance, such as Olaiis Magnus and 
Denis de Montfort, gave credit— which they are scarcely justified in 
doing— to the assertions of certain writers of the north of Europe, who 
believed seriously in the existence of a sea-monster of prodigious size 
"which haunted the northern seas. This monster has received the 
name of the Kraken. The Kraken was long the terror of these seas ; 
h arrested ships in spite of the action of the wind, sails, and oars, 
often causing them to founder at sea, while the cause of shipwreck 
remained unsuspected. Denis de Montfort gives a scientific descrip- 
tion and representation of this Kraken, which he calls the Colossal 
Poulpe, in which the creature is made to embrace a three-masted 
ship in its vast arms. Delighted with the success which his repre- 
sentation met with, Denis laughed at the credulity of his contempo- 
raries. “ If my Kraken takes with them,” he said, “ I shall make it 
extend its arms to both shores of the Straits of Gibraltar.” To 
another learned friend he said, “ If my entangled ship is accepted, I 
shall make my Poulpe overthrow a whole fleet.” 
Among those who admitted the facetious history of the Kraken 
without a smile, there was at least one holy bishop, who was, more- 
over, something of a naturalist. Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, 
m Norway, in one of his books assures us that a whole regiment of 
soldiers could easily manoeuvre on the back of the Kraken, which he 
compares to a floating island. “ Similior insulse quam bestim,” wrote 
the good Bishop of Bergen. 
In the first edition of his “ System of Nature,” Linnaeus himself 
admits the existence of this colossus of the seas, which he calls Sepia 
microcosmos. Better informed in the following edition, he erased the 
•Shaken from his catalogue. 
The statements of Pliny respecting the Colossal Poulpe, like those 
of Montfort about the Kraken, are evidently fabulous. It is, how- 
ever, an undisputed fact that there exists in the Mediterranean and 
