the three men in its arms, and drew them under water in spite of every effort to preserve them: the thickness of one of the arms, which was cut off in the contest, was that of a mizen-mast, and the suckers, of the size of pot-lids."

A variety of statements have been made in different places, and at various periods, all tending to strengthen the belief that such enormous octopods exist, and it is not easy to avoid concurring in the opinion of a celebrated. naturalist, who has discussed the subject with great

ability, that the different authorities who have referred to it "are sufficient to establish the existence of an enormous inhabitant of the deep,-a cuttle-fish possessed of characters which in a remarkable degree distinguish it from every other creature with which we are familiar;" and further, that it would be "contrary to an enlightened philosophy to reject as spurious the history of an animal, the existence of which is rendered so probable by evidence deduced from the prevailing belief of different tribes of

mankind, whose opinions, it is evident, could not have been influenced or affected by the traditions of each other, but must have resulted from the occasional appearances of the monster itself in different quarters of the globe."

The eggs of the cuttle-fish are almost as remarkable as the animal itself. They are oval, or rather spindle-shaped bodies, about the size of grapes, and somewhat like them in colour; one end of each egg is furnished with a fleshy stalk, and the other is prolonged to a nipple-shaped point, and the skin is tough like india-rubber. By means of the stalk the egg is attached to branches of sea-weed, and numbers of them united to the same substance form a cluster by no means unlike a bunch of grapes, and appearing to an observer unacquainted with their real character to be some species of sea plant.

These eggs or bladders contain at first a yolk of a white colour enclosed in transparent albumen, but as it advances toward maturity the contents assume the form of the young cuttle-fish, which is at length excluded, like the chick from the shell, by the opening of the envelope in which it is enclosed.

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term Acalephæ,-the Greek word for nettles-a title they have merited from their power of stinging; yet they do not less deserve to be called the fairies of the deep. They are also known as Medusa, and popularly as jellyfish.

It is impossible to contemplate these creatures without surprise. Their bodies are frail in the extreme. They appear to be no more than a mass of jelly. Yet that jelly is animated.

The property of emitting light which many of the acalephæ possess the power of stinging seated even in the finest of their thread-like tentacula, and the wonderful digestive powers by which their stomachs quickly dissolve