the smaller at the extremities. Each row
contains twenty-five of these. There are, therefore, fifty pustules to
each feeler, and the creature possesses in the whole four hundred. These
pustules are capable of acting like cupping-glasses. They are
cartilaginous substances, cylindrical, horny, and livid. Upon the large
species they diminish gradually from the diameter of a five-franc piece
to the size of a split pea. These small tubes can be thrust out and
withdrawn by the animal at will. They are capable of piercing to a depth
of more than an inch.

This sucking apparatus has all the regularity and delicacy of a
key-board. It stands forth at one moment and disappears the next. The
most perfect sensitiveness cannot equal the contractibility of these
suckers; always proportioned to the internal movement of the animal, and
its exterior circumstances. The monster is endowed with the qualities of
the sensitive plant.

This animal is the same as those which mariners call Poulps; which
science designates Cephalopterae, and which ancient legends call Krakens.
It is the English sailors who call them "Devil-fish," and sometimes
Bloodsuckers. In the Channel Islands they are called _pieuvres_.

They are rare at Guernsey, very small at Jersey; but near the island of
Sark are numerous as well as very large.

An engraving in Sonnini's edition of Buffon represents a Cephaloptera
crushing a frigate. Denis Montfort, in fact, considers the Poulp, or
Octopod, of high latitudes, strong enough to destroy a ship. Bory Saint
Vincent doubts this; but he shows that in our regions they will attack
men. Near Brecq-Hou, in Sark, they show a cave where a devil-fish a few
years since seized and drowned a lobster-fisher. Peron and Lamarck are
in error in their belief that the "poulp" having no fins cannot swim. He
who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes, at Sark, in the
cavern called the Boutiques, a pieuvre swimming and pursuing a bather.
When captured and killed, this specimen was found to be four English
feet broad, and it was possible to count its four hundred suckers. The
monster thrust them out convulsively in the agony of death.

According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose marvellous
intuition sinks or raises them to the level of magicians, the poulp is
almost endowed with the passions of man: it has its hatreds. In fact, in
the Absolute to be hideous is to hate.

Hideousness struggles under the natural law of elimi