Taking the softness of the cephalopoda into consideration, and comparing it with the hard, solid, block-like body of the whale, it is not easy to imagine that there would ever be a different result to a rencontre between the two. Still, this may be possible. By the mere doctrine of chances, it is very unlikely that the largest specimen of a creature but very seldom seen should represent the greatest size to which it ever attains. Eight great tentacles of, let us say, thirty feet long are, as we have seen, incapable of holding a large bull cachalot powerless in their embrace. But to what length may not those tentacles grow, and would a length of fifty, seventy, or eighty feet be sufficient to do so? Sixteen mighty cables—for arms like these would wind at least twice about their enemy—would make a net from which even the hugest whale might find it difficult to free himself, and even he might at last yield to that paralysing effect which the suckers of the cuttlefish are supposed to have upon their prey. Then, again, there are female cachalots as well as males, and these are but half the size of the latter. Upon them or the young, are the wrongs of the giant octopus ever avenged? I have speculated, in face of the incident here alluded to, upon the possibility of a cuttlefish’s tentacles sometimes reaching thirty feet in length, but there seems to be better evidence—that of actual contact and measurement—of their sometimes being longer still. Whilst in the death agony the cachalot belches out the contents of his vast stomach, which consist, for the most part, of huge-sized fragments of such great cuttlefishes, which have been bitten off and swallowed whole. Mr. Bullen fished up and examined one of these fragments, which he found to be a piece of an arm about five feet square, having on it six or seven round sucking discs, of the size of saucers, armed on their outer circumference with large sharp hooks resembling a tiger’s claw. On a subsequent occasion, still larger fragments were observed, their size being taken to equal that of the ship’s hatch-house, which was eight feet long, with a breadth and height of six feet. What must have been the length of the entire tentacle, of which such blocks as these were the component parts? Since one of seven feet long measured only seven or eight inches round the base, the calculation is not difficult to make, but I will leave the making of it to someone else. If we suppose, however, that these gobbets represented portions of the expanded ends, only, of two greatly elongated tentacles, which the various species of decapods possess, over and above the other eight, this would make their entire length immense: since such expanded part bears but a small proportion to the tentacle as a whole, and is not much more than twice its narrower circumference.