diver and devoured him at its leisure in the twilight depths of the sea.
Such monsters as these, it has been dryly thought, belong only to legend and fable and poem, but this is not the case. Pieuvres of the Victor Hugo type, and “things” such as Schiller hints at, are, it is true, exaggerated specimens of the species, but their congeners — and dreadful ones, too — do actually exist, for they have been seen and fought with and described, and scientific conditions are all amply satisfied by those descriptions. Not long ago, a government diver at Belfast, Victoria, had a narrow escape from losing his life in the clutch of a huge octopus. It had seized his left arm, causing dreadful agony by the fastening of its suckers upon the limb; but the diver had an iron bar in his right hand, and, after a struggle that seemed to him to last twenty minutes, during which the monster tried hard to drag him down, he battered his assailant into a shapeless mass, and freed himself from its horrid grasp. Schiller’s “Taucher” had no iron bar, and his bones, therefore, went to increase the- heap which pieuvres, so Victor Hugo says, accumulate at the mouths of their deep-sea dens.
It is all-important, for the existence of these monstrous poulpes, cuttle-fish, octopuses, or sepias, that Science should countenance them; for, so long as professors array their calmly sceptical opinions on the one side, no number of sworn affidavits from the public as to personal encounters with the pieuvre will suffice to establish the creature as a verity. In the case of that other terror of the ocean, the sea-serpent, science goes dead against its existence, and Professor Owen speaks far too weightily for even sober official accounts of the
