458 
THE OCEAN WORLD. 
other seas cuttle-fish — a congenerous animal — of considerable size. A 
calmar has been caught in our own time, near Nice, which weighed 
upwards of thirty pounds. In the same neighbourhood some fisher- 
men caught, twenty years ago, an individual of the same genus nearly 
six feet long, which is preserved in the Museum of Natural History 
at Montpelier. Peron, the naturalist, met in the Australian seas a 
cuttle-fish nearly eight feet long. The travellers Quoy and Gaimard 
picked up in the Atlantic Ocean, near the Equator, the skeleton of a 
monstrous mollusc, which, according to their calculations, must have 
weighed two hundred pounds. M. Rung met, in the middle of the 
ocean, a mollusc with short arms, and of a reddish colour, the body of 
which, according to this naturalist, was as large as a tun cask. One 
of the mandibles of this creature, still preserved in the Museum of the 
College of Surgeons, is larger than a hand. 
In 1853 a gigantic cephalopod was stranded on the coast of Jut- 
land. The body of this monster, which was dismembered by the 
fishermen, furnished many wheelbarrow loads, its pharynx, or back 
part of the mouth, alone being as large as the head of an infant. 
Dr. Steenstrup, of Copenhagen, who published a description of this 
creature under the name of Architeuthis dux, shows a portion of the 
arm of another cephalopod, which is as large as the thigh-bone of a 
man. But a well-authenticated fact connected with these gigantic 
cephalopods is related by Lieutenant Bayer, of the French cor- 
vette Alecton, and M. Sabin Berthelot, French Consul at the Canary 
Islands, by whom the report, is made to the Aeademie des Sciences. 
The steam-corvette Alecton was between Tcnerifte and Madeira when 
she fell in with a gigantic calamary, not less — according to the account 
—than fifteen metres (fifty feet) long, without reckoning its eight for- 
midable arms, covered with suckers, and about twenty feet in circum- 
ference at its largest part, the head terminating in many arms of enor- 
mous size, the other extremity terminating in two fleshy lobes or fins of 
great size, the weight of the whole being estimated at four thousand 
pounds ; the flesh was soft, glutinous, and of reddish-brick colour. 
The commandant, wishing in the interests of science to secure the 
monster, actually engaged it in battle. Numerous shots were aimed 
at it, but the balls traversed its flaccid and glutinous mass without 
causing it any vital injury. But after one of these attacks the waves 
were observed to be covered with foam and blood, and, singular thing, a 
