stence in a casual way, as they float over the waves
with members relaxed, snatched at by the iron jaws of the flesh-eating
fish. The great danger for them is that a chance current might place
this plunder of the immense marine desert before the prow of a
slow-going sailboat.

A corvette of the French navy once encountered near the Canary Isles a
complete specimen of one of these monsters floating upon the sea, sick
or wounded. The officials sketched its form and noted its
phosphorescence and changes of color, but after a two-hour struggle
with its indomitable force and its slippery mucosity constantly
escaping the pressure of blows and harpoons, they had to let it slip
back into the ocean.

It was the Prince of Monaco, supreme pontiff of oceanographic science,
who established forever the existence of the fabulous _kraken_. In one
of his intelligent excursions across oceanic solitudes he fished up an
arm of a cuttlefish eight yards long. Furthermore the stomachs of
sharks, upon being opened, had revealed to him the gigantic fragments
of the adversary.

Short and terrible battles used to agitate the black and phosphorescent
water, thousands of fathoms from the surface, with whirlwinds of death.

The shark would descend, attracted by the appetizing prospect of a
boneless animal,--all flesh and weighing several tons. He would make
his hostile invasion in all haste so as not to be obliged to endure for
a long time the formidable pressure of the abyss. The struggle between
the two ferocious warriors disputing oceanic dominion was usually brief
and deadly,--the mandible battling with the sucker; the solid and
cutting equipment of teeth with the phosphorescent mucosity incessantly
slipping by and opposing the blow of the demolishing head like a
battering ram, with the lashing blow of tentacles thicker and heavier
than an elephant's trunk. Sometimes the shark would remain down
forever, enmeshed in a skein of soft snakes absorbing it with
gluttonous deliberation; at other times it would come to the surface
with its skin bristling with black tumors,--open mouths and slashes big
as plates,--but with its stomach full of gelatinous meat.

These cuttlefish in the Aquarium were nothing more than the seaside
inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast,--poor relations of the gigantic
octopus that lighten the black gloom of the oceanic night with their
bluish gleam of burned-out planets. But in spite of their relative
smallness, they a