ar. "Probably a new and larger
variety of _Octopus_ so-and-so, hitherto supposed to be tropical," says
Professor Gargoyle, and thinks he has disposed of it. Then conceive some
mysterious boating accidents and deaths while bathing. A large animal of
this kind coming into a region of frequent wrecks might so easily
acquire a preferential taste for human nutriment, just as the Colorado
beetle acquired a new taste for the common potato and gave up its old
food-plants some years ago. Then perhaps a school or pack or flock of
_Octopus gigas_ would be found busy picking the sailors off a stranded
ship, and then in the course of a few score years it might begin to
stroll up the beaches and batten on excursionists. Soon it would be a
common feature of the watering-places--possibly at last commoner than
excursionists. Suppose such a creature were to appear--and it is, we
repeat, a possibility, if perhaps a remote one--how could it be fought
against? Something might be done by torpedoes; but, so far as our past
knowledge goes, man has no means of seriously diminishing the numbers of
any animal of the most rudimentary intelligence that made its fastness
in the sea.

Even on land it is possible to find creatures that with a little
modification might become excessively dangerous to the human ascendency.
Most people have read of the migratory ants of Central Africa, against
which no man can stand. On the march they simply clear out whole
villages, drive men and animals before them in headlong rout, and kill
and eat every living creature they can capture. One wonders why they
have not already spread the area of their devastations. But at present
no doubt they have their natural checks, of ant-eating birds, or what
not. In the near future it may be that the European immigrant, as he
sets the balance of life swinging in his vigorous manner, may kill off
these ant-eating animals, or otherwise unwittingly remove the checks
that now keep these terrible little pests within limits. And once they
begin to spread in real earnest, it is hard to see how their advance
could be stopped. A world devoured by ants seems incredible now, simply
because it is not within our experience; but a naturalist would have a
dull imagination who could not see in the numerous species of ants, and
in their already high intelligence, far more possibility of strange
developments than we have in the solitary human animal. And no doubt the
idea of the small and feeble o