The history of the ancient belief in the existence of gigantic cephalopods is somewhat obscure. All that we know of it is from passages in the works of a few old Greek and Latin authors, and a series of Scandinavian traditions. I have already referred to the “monstrous polypus” mentioned by Pliny,[30] which, at Carteia, in Grenada, used to come out of the sea at night, and carry off salted tunnies from the curing depôts on the shore, and also to the incident recorded by Ælian,[31] who describes his monster as crushing up the barrels of salt-fish in its arms, to get at the contents. In the legends of northern nations stories of the existence of a marine animal of such enormous size that it more resembled an island than an organised being frequently found a place; and though the descriptions given of it were wild and extravagant, it is not difficult to recognise in the ill-drawn and distorted portrait the attempted likeness of one of the cephalopoda. Olaus Magnus[32] relates many wondrous narratives of sea-monsters,—tales which had gathered and accumulated marvels as they were passed on from generation to generation in oral history, and which he took care to bequeath to his successors undeprived of any of their fascination. Eric Pontoppidan, the younger, Bishop of Bergen, is generally, but unjustly, regarded as the inventor of the fabulous Kraken, and is constantly misquoted by authors who have never read his work,[33] and who, one after another, have copied from their predecessors erroneous statements concerning him. More than half a century before him Christian Francis Paullinus,[34] a physician and naturalist of Eisenach, who evinced in his writings an admiration of the marvellous rather than of the useful, had described as resembling Gesner’s “Heracleoticon,” a monstrous animal which occasionally rose from the sea on the coasts of Lapland and Finmark, and which was of such enormous dimensions that a regiment of soldiers could conveniently manœuvre on its back. Pontoppidan was not a fabricator of falsehoods; but, in collecting evidence relating to the “great beasts” living in “the great and wide sea,” was influenced, as he tells us, by “a desire to extend the popular knowledge of the glorious works of a beneficent Creator.” His fault, or mistake, was that he gave too much credence to old narratives and traditions of floating islands and sea-monsters, and to the superstitious beliefs and exaggerated statements of ignorant fishermen. If those who abuse him had lived in his day they would probably have done the same. The tone of his concluding remarks is not that of an intentional deceiver and knave. He says he “believes the accounts given to be true and well attested,” and that he “leaves it to future writers to complete what he has imperfectly sketched out, by further experience, which is always the best instructor.” No wonder, therefore, that his evident sincerity and the respectability of episcopal advocacy obtained