The Poulpe, that terrible and living steam machine, can accumulate such incalculable force and elasticity, that, as d'Orbigny tells us (see his article Cephal.) it can leap from the sea to the deck of a ship. This at once relieves our old voyagers from the charge so often and so lightly made against them, of exaggeration and mere romance. They told us, and it now seems quite truly told us, that they came athwart a gigantic Poulpe that leaped inboard, twining its prodigious arms around masts and shrouds; and the monstrous creature would have had possession of the craft, and would have devoured all hands, but that these latter cut away its arms with their axes, as they would have cut away masts in a case of impending wreck, and the mutilated but still threatening creature fell into the sea. Some have given this creature credit for arms of sixty feet in length; and others have reported that while cruising in the North seas, they fell in with the Kraken, a monstrous creature, half a league in circumference, no doubt, one of our terrible _Poulpes_, able to embrace, stupefy, and devour, a whale a hundred feet long. The prolonged existence of these monsters, would have endangered Nature herself, would have absorbed our very globe. But, on the one hand, gigantic birds (perhaps, for instance, the _Epiornis_) made war upon them; and on the other hand the exhausted earth destroyed the monster by cutting off its supply of alimentation. Thank Heaven, our existing Poulpes are somewhat less terrible. Their elegant species of the present day, the Argonaut, that graceful swimmer in its wavy shell, the Calmar, good sailor, if ever there was one, and the handsome Seiche, blue-eyed, and beautiful to look upon, traverse the Ocean, hither and thither, annoying nothing but the small creatures that they need for their support. In them we see exhibited the first approach to the vertebral bone; they display, too, a perfect rainbow of changing colors, that come and go--shine, fade, dazzle and die. We may quite fairly call them the Chameleons of the sea. They have the exquisite perfume, ambergris, which the whale only owes to the countless multitudes of Seiches which it has absorbed. And the porpoises, too, make an enormous destruction of them. Your Seiches are very gregarious. About the month of May, they seek the coast to deposit their eggs, and the Porpoises await them there, sure of a splendid banquet. And your Porpoise is somewhat of a _gourmet_ though sufficiently _gourmand_; he feeds delicately, though we cannot deny that he feeds largely. The head and the eight arms are his tid-bits, tender and easy of digestion; the rest of the carcass they may have who come for it. Tens of thousands of these mutilated Seiches you find upon the coast at Royan; and there, too, you will see the Porpoises making their mighty bounds when in chase of their coveted prey, the Seiches, or in bacchanal enjoyment and revelling when the prey has been taken and the banquet is over.