THE NATUBAL SCIENCE JOURNAL. 
19 
of grasping a ships masts with its long- 
arms, and pulling it beneath the waves. 
Passing over the ancient legends, and 
the fabulous accounts of the great Nor¬ 
wegian Kraken, we come to more recent 
and trustworthy records. Some twenty 
years ago a gigantic cuttle-fish was 
caught off the coast of Ireland whose 
head weighed 112 pounds, whose eyes 
were fifteen inches in diameter, and 
whose tentacles w'ere thirty feet long. 
Stories of cephalopods forty, eighty and 
even ninety feet long have been told by 
Newfoundlanders ; but as these estimates 
were generally made in periods of excite¬ 
ment little reliance can be placed upon 
the figures, d'o show to what an extent 
credulity may carry one, we have the 
ancient church legend of the Bishop of 
Nidros, who, it is said, discovered one of 
these monsters asleep in the sun, and 
mistook it for a huge rock. Accordingly 
he raised an altar upon its surface, and 
celebrated mass. The good-natured 
creature waited until the bishop had 
regained the shore, when it sank beneath 
the water. 
That such tales, gross exaggerations 
’tho’ they may be, are not wholly without 
foundation, the events of last year have 
conclusively proved. Two well authen¬ 
ticated accounts have come to us concern¬ 
ing these monsters, one, of the attack 
upon a whale by a cuttle-fish, the other, 
a scientific report of the contents of a 
whale’s stomach. On very fair authority, 
we have the weight of one such monster 
placed at 4400 pounds. It is supposed 
that they inhabit great depths and, under 
normal conditions, are not to be met 
with near the surface. Future investiga¬ 
tion may show the ancient myths well 
founded, and the fables to be truths. 
Department of fSotang. 
FERN SPORES- 
AVTllakd N. Cixte. 
NE of the first steps in the study of 
ferns is the identification of the 
species in one’s own locality, and since 
the form, structure, and arrangement of 
the spore-bearing bodies play an import¬ 
ant part in the classification of ferns, a 
knowledge of these becomes necessary at 
once. 
The majority of ferns in the Northern 
States produce their spores in July or 
even later, but a few kinds may be had 
as early as May. Go to the nearest 
woodland in summer, and selecting a 
handful of fronds at random, examine 
their under surfaces. Some of the earli¬ 
est fronds on each plant commonly do 
not bear spores and are called sterile 
fronds, but the rest will be found to 
have tlie underside plentifully sprinkled 
with small dots .that vary in shape with 
different species, some being round, some 
kidney-shaped and others linear or 
curved. These are the fruit-dots. Among 
the handful, especially if they have been 
gathered in rather dry, rocky woods, will 
doubtless be found the common polypody 
— a most cosmopolitan member of the 
family and one that may well serve to 
illustrate the subject. Its fruit-dots are 
round and nearly an eighth of an inch 
across. Under the microscope these dots 
appear as hemispherical heaps of orange- 
colored globes — individually smaller 
than the diameter of a pin, and each 
borne on a slender stalk. In these tiny 
globes the spores are produced. At ma¬ 
turity a ring of cells running around the 
globe is ruptured, allowing the spores to 
