In the common calmar, Loligo vulgaris (Fig. 319), and the Loligo Gahi (Fig. 320), we have two extreme forms represented, both taken from the magnificent work of MM. D'Orbigny and Ferussac, on the Cephalopodes acetabulifores. These molluscs are whitish-blue and transparent, covered with spots of bright red. The osselet is lanceolate—that of the male elongated and somewhat resembling a feather, that of the female much broader and more obtuse. Their head is short, furnished with two large projecting eyes; the mouth is surrounded with ten arms, provided with suckers, two of these being much longer than the others, having peduncles or foot-stalks.
The internal bone of the calmar differs much from that of the cuttles; it is thin, horny, transparent, and somewhat resembling a feather, from a portion of which the barbs have been removed. Their food consists chiefly of small fishes and molluscs. With the greater fishes and cetaceæ they carry on constant war. They are caught and used for various purposes; along the coast they are eaten; the fishermen use them as bait, especially in fishing for cod.
It is no easy task to separate the real from the fabulous history of the Cephalopods. Aristotle and Pliny have alike assisted, by their marvellous relations, to throw that halo of wonder round it which the light of modern science has not altogether dispelled. Pliny the Ancient relates the history of an enormous cuttle-fish which haunted the coast of Spain, and destroyed the fishing-grounds. He adds that this gigantic creature was finally taken, that its body weighed seven hundred pounds, and that its arms were ten yards in length. Its head came by right to Lucullus, to whose gastronomical privileges be all honour. It was so large, says Pliny, that it filled fifteen amphoræ, and weighed seven hundred pounds also.
Some naturalists of the Renaissance, such as Olaüs Magnus and Denis de Montfort, gave credit—which they are scarcely justified in doing—to the assertions of certain writers of the north of Europe, who believed seriously in the existence of a sea-monster of prodigious size which haunted the northern seas. This monster has received the name of the Kraken. The Kraken was long the terror of these seas; it arrested ships in spite of the action of the wind, sails, and oars, often causing them to founder at sea, while the cause of shipwreck remained unsuspected. Denis de Montfort gives a description and representation of this Kraken, which he calls the Colossal Poulpe, in which the creature is made to embrace a three-masted ship in its vast arms. Delighted with the success which his representation met with, Denis laughed at the credulity of his contemporaries. "If my Kraken takes with them," he said, "I shall make it extend its arms to both shores of the Straits of Gibraltar." To another learned friend he said, "If my entangled ship is accepted, I shall make my Poulpe overthrow a whole fleet."
Among those who admitted the facetious history of the Kraken without a smile, there was at least one holy bishop, who was, moreover, something of a naturalist. Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, in Norway, in one of his books assures us that a whole regiment of soldiers could easily manœuvre on the back of the Kraken, which he compares to a floating island. "Similior insulæ quan bestiæ," wrote the good Bishop of Bergen.
In the first edition of his "System of Nature," Linnæus himself admits the existence of this colossus of the seas, which he calls Sepias microcosmos. Better informed in the following edition, he erased the Kraken from his catalogue.
The statements of Pliny respecting the Colossal Poulpe, like those of Montfort about the Kraken, are evidently fabulous. It is, however, an undisputed fact that there exists in the Mediterranean and other seas cuttle-fish—a congenerous animal—of considerable size. A calmar has been caught in our own time, near Nice, which weighed upwards of thirty pounds. In the same neighbourhood some fishermen caught, twenty years ago, an individual of the same genus nearly six feet long, which is preserved in the Museum of Natural History at Montpellier. Péron, the naturalist, met in the Australian seas a cuttle-fish nearly eight feet long. The travellers Quoy and Gaimard picked up in the Atlantic Ocean, near the Equator, the skeleton of a monstrous mollusc, which, according to their calculations, must have weighed two hundred pounds. M. Rung met, in the middle of the ocean, a mollusc with short arms, and of a reddish colour, the body of which, according to this naturalist, was as large as a tun cask. One of the mandibles of this creature, still preserved in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, is larger than a hand.
In 1853 a gigantic cephalopod was stranded on the coast of Jutland. The body of this monster, which was dismembered by the fishermen, furnished many wheelbarrow loads, its pharynx, or back part of the mouth, alone being as large as the head of an infant. Dr. Steenstrup, of Copenhagen, who published a description of this creature under the name of Architeuthis dux, shows a portion of the arm of another cephalopod, which is as large as the thigh-bone of a man. But a well-authenticated fact connected with these gigantic cephalopods is related by Lieutenant Bayer, of the French corvette Alecton, and M. Sabin Berthelot, French Consul at the Canary Islands, by whom the report is made to the Académie des Sciences.
The steam-corvette Alecton was between Teneriffe and Madeira when she fell in with a gigantic calamary, not less—according to the account—than fifteen mètres (fifty feet) long, without reckoning its eight formidable arms, covered with suckers, and about twenty feet in circumference at its largest part, the head terminating in many arms of enormous size, the other extremity terminating in two fleshy lobes or fins of great size, the weight of the whole being estimated at four thousand pounds; the flesh was soft, glutinous, and of reddish-brick colour.
The commandant, wishing in the interests of science to secure the monster, actually engaged it in battle. Numerous shots were aimed at it, but the balls traversed its flaccid and glutinous mass without causing it any vital injury. But after one of these attacks the waves were observed to be covered with foam and blood, and, singular thing, a strong odour of musk was inhaled by the spectators. This musk odour we have already noticed as being peculiar to many of the Cephalopods.