seas, the same fearless confidence in man is rapidly hastening its extinction. The flesh is excellent food, the blubber yields a fine oil, the skin is of valuable toughness, and so before long the manatee of the warm seas may be expected to be as extinct as its congener of the cold North, — the lost rhytina of Behring’s Straits.
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Victor Hugo, in his Guernsey romance, “The Toilers of the Sea,” presented the world with a monster, a terror of the deep waters, something like the gruesome spider-grab of Erckmann-Chatrian, but even more horrible. It was the pieuvre, a colossal cuttle-fish, which had its den far down in the sea among the roots of the rocks; a terrible long-armed thing that lurked in the caverns of the deep, grappling from its retreat with any passing creature, paralyzing it by fastening one by one a thousand suckers upon it, and slowly dragging its victim, numbed with pain, towards the awful iron beak that lay in the centre of the soft, cruel arms. The novelist’s pieuvre was hideous enough, and his description surpassing in its horrors, but in Schiller’s poem of “The Diver,” a thing of similar character, but rendered even more awful by not being described at all, compasses the death of the hero. He did not, like Victor Hugo’s sailor, have a protracted struggle with the mysterious creature, and then come back to his friends with details of its personal appearance, but he dived out of sight and never returned. Schiller does not attempt, therefore, to describe the indescribable thing, but simply calling it das, throws the reader back in imagination upon all the horrible legends of the Mediterranean coasts and islands, to guess for himself the sort of monster it must have been that had seized the hapless
