Himself a monster, the cachalot feeds on other monsters of the deep, as huge, almost, and still more monstrous-looking than himself. It has long been known that some parts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans are inhabited by cuttlefish of a size sufficient to make them at least an annoyance, if not an absolute danger, to man. Captain Cook, in his first voyage, fell in with the floating body of one of these creatures, which, judging from the parts that were brought home and placed in the Hunterian Museum in London, must have attained a length of at least six feet, measuring along the body to the tips of the tentacles. Another, a larger one, was sighted by the French voyager Peron off the coast of Tasmania. This is described as rolling over and over in the water, but whether alive or not, is not distinctly stated. It was, however, taken on board, and, on measurement, the arms, or tentacles, alone, were found to be seven feet in length. They were eight in number—the usual complement of the group to which this species belongs, and which is thence called _octopus_—and had the appearance of so many writhing and hideous-looking snakes. Here, then, were ascertained facts, and if Nature could have been held back by the discreditings and head-shakings of learned professors, who piqued themselves on sobriety of judgment, these ample measurements would have remained the limit of her capacity, as far as cuttlefish were concerned. Here, indeed, in a parrot-beaked, sack-bodied cephalopod, with eight waving tentacles, seven feet long and as many inches in circumference at the base, we had a being—it might even be called a monster—quite capable of seizing, drowning, and even of afterwards devouring the most expert and stalwart of the Polynesian pearl-divers. What more was wanted? Why would people keep on talking about and even seeing cuttlefish of much greater size, by which discoveries professors themselves ran the risk of having, ultimately, to give their sanction to, or even to make, statements which, in spite of all their names and titles could do to make them look sober, would still smack a little of imaginative wildness? However, the thing continued—as, indeed, it had begun long before. Pliny—or was it Aristotle—had started it, by talking of tentacles thirty feet long, and thick in proportion; but Pliny, though a sort of professor himself, had lived so long ago that he need not be treated like one. Later, in the Middle Ages, came rumours of cuttlefishes that flung their vast sucker-armed feelers aloft amidst the rigging of ships, and overwhelmed them in the waves. But this, too, was pre-scientific, and though the accounts of the great kraken of the Norwegian seas belonged to the age in which scientific voyages had been made, and cuttlefish actually measured, yet these were so obviously fabulous that no sober-minded scientist, with a reputation for incredulity to maintain, need trouble himself about them.