THE LIVING WORLD. 
29 
with brown and purplish-brown spottings. Its eyes are used as neck-pearls; its 
skeleton for pet birds, for the pounce used in writing and in embroidering, and 
for small delicate casting. It is a source of 
loss to the professional fisherman, as it attacks 
the fish in the seines or nets. 
In regard to these once very popular super¬ 
stitions the learned Dr. Walsh submits the fol¬ 
lowing opinion: 
“We cannot doubt that the depths of the 
sea, where vegetables flourish eight hundred 
feet in length, are also peopled with monstrous 
animals, whose organism is adapted to these 
unknown regions, whence they but rarely 
emerge. Their very real appearances have 
formed the basis of the mysterious traditions 
which, for more than two thousand years, have 
been transmitted from generation to genera¬ 
tion of mariners, and which have given birth 
to the fantastic creation of the kraken and the THE decapoda cuttle. 
sea serpent. While masses of small gelatinous 
medusas floating at the surface provide food for enormous whales, there is also 
at the bottom of the sea an abundant prey for these prodigious animals.” 
THE fabled kraken. 
It is an undisputed fact that there exist in the Mediterranean and other 
seas cuttle-fish of extraordinary size; to deny this would be to dispute the 
