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In a paper once read to the British Association by Colonel Smith, the writer adduced many instances of colossal sepias, among them an enormity of forty feet, and another, hardly less, of which fragments are preserved in the Haarlem Museum. General Eden records one of over twenty feet in length, and another creature of the same order, taken up on a ship at sea, which had arms that measured no less than thirty-six feet. In this way, increasing foot by foot, each enlarging specimen becomes a possibility, until at last there would be no reason for disbelieving even that wonderful story of Captain Blaney, who mistook a dead cuttle-fish for a bank, and landed on it with sixty men! But this was of course very long ago indeed, and may now be relegated to the limbo of Pontoppidan’s famous monsters, — the krakens with lions’ manes, that got up on end and roared, and pieuvres that hunted ships at sea. If ever, however, the cuttle fish should reach its fullest length and greatest bulk, the sea-serpent itself would have but a poor chance with it, so that we have, after all, the satisfaction of knowing that, though science forbids us to possess a kraken, we do possess in actual fact another monster which, if the kraken did exist, could probably catch it and eat it up.

Sea-serpents, in spite of repeated efforts to obtain respectable recognition, have been hitherto regarded as mythical. For one thing, they showed no judgment in the selection of individuals to whom to exhibit themselves; and the testimony of their existence afforded by the masters of ships unknown on Lloyd’s registers, and by American captains “of undoubted veracity” served only to plunge the monsters of the deep seas more