M. Hugo fortunately gives us the means of estimating the size of the body of the octopus which attacked Gilliatt. He tells us that its arms were “nearly a metre (thirty-nine inches) long.” None of quite so great dimensions have, I believe, been found in the English Channel, but it is not impossible that such exist. Granting this, the body of such an octopus would not be very much larger than a soda-water bottle or a Florence-flask, such as olive-oil is sold in: and so the “horrible bag, which is a monster,” and into which you are to be inhaled and drawn alive, is but a small affair after all. The plain truth is, that the octopus and other cephalopods obtain and eat their food very much like the rapacious birds. They are the falcons of the sea. Some of them, like Onychoteuthis, strike their prey with talons and suckers also; others, like the octopus, lay hold of it with suckers alone; but they all tear the flesh with their beaks, and swallow and digest their food in as unromantic a fashion as does hawk or vulture. But it is when the author indulges in what he is pleased to call “philosophical meditation” on such animals that he arrives at the highest point of hyperbolical mystery. He tells us:— “They are the chosen forms of evil. What are we to do in presence of these blasphemies of creation against itself?... The possible is a formidable matrix. Mystery concretes itself in monsters. Portions of shades come forth from this block, the perpetual; tear themselves, divide themselves, roll, float, condense, borrow from the ambient blackness, undergo unknown polarizations, assume life, compose for themselves who can tell what forms with obscurity, what souls with miasma; and issue from them larvæ, athwart the course of vitality. They are as the darkness converted into beasts. Of what use, for what purpose, are such creatures?—relapse of the eternal question! These animals are phantoms as much as monsters. They are the amphibiæ of death, the visible extremities of black circles. They mark the transition of our reality to another.” To analyse this is beyond my powers. One can only wonder what it all means. The language is sententious, and would, no doubt, be impressive if it were not incomprehensible. It reminds one of Mr. Maccabe’s “Welsh sermon,” which, delivered with solemn earnestness, rolls forth in grandly sonorous tones, but has not a word of Welsh or sense in it; or of the “nonsense-problem” which Mark Twain says was propounded to him by Artemus Ward, and which seemed so full of thought and so clearly put that he blamed his “wooden head” because he got into a hopeless tangle over it, until he found he had been entrapped into pondering over “a string of plausibly worded sentences that did not mean anything under the sun.” Let us now take evidence concerning the dimensions to which the octopus is known to attain, and the degree in which it may be regarded as dangerous to man.