The seas are little explored (1857), and there are legends of ichthyological marvels which remind us of European romantic zoology. I was told by Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton of a fish, possibly one of the Murænidæ, measuring nine feet long by three in diameter: the shape was somewhat like a leech, both extremities being similar; the _ribs_ resembled, but were rather flatter than, those of a bullock, and the flesh had the appearance of beef. A specimen, he said, had lately been brought from Kipombui, a small harbour opposite Zanzibar; the prey, however, is always cut up as soon as caught. This reminds us of the ‘full-sized devil-fish’ of the West Indian seas. The Arabs describe a monstrous polypus, with huge eyes and arms 10 feet long: they declare that it has entangled bathers and pulled them down close to shore. It is, in fact, the ‘piuvre,’ so famed of late; and since I left Zanzibar a French illustrated newspaper showed one of these horrors grappling with a man of war’s gig. Thus Oppian described a fish that smothered mariners with its monstrous wings, and drew them under water wrapped in a lethal embrace. Nieuhoff (Brazil, 1640) mentions a ‘lamprey’ at Pernambuco that ‘snatched all that fell in this way (both men and dogs that swam sometimes after the boat) into the water.’ Finally, Carsten Niebuhr (Arabia, chap. i. p. 140. 1762) declares that ‘the cuttle-fish is dangerous to swimmers and divers, of whom it lays hold with its long claws; these do not wound, but produce swelling, internal pains, and often an incipient paralysis.’