The Forest Republican. [volume] (Tionesta, Pa.) 1869-1952, 1886-05-19
Gigantic Cuttlefish.

The honor of setting as rest all doubts
as to the great squid certainly belongs to
Rev. M. Harvey, the learned and accu-
rate Newfoundland naturalist. In 1878,
two fishermen were catching cod in Con-
ception bay, when they saw a shapeless
mass floating on the water at little dis
tance. "Wreck, no doubt" they said to
themselves; and as fishermen are not
above salvage, they approached close to
it, and struck it with boat hook. In a
second the supposed wreck developed sud
denly into a fearsome monster, opened
its huge, staring eyes ferociously with a
CHASTITY roll, and snapped at the boat
hook with its huge bill or jaws. The
men were so fascinated with. terror that
they could not move; and before they
had recovered their self possession the
creature was full upon them, shooting
out from its head several long, fieshy
arms, and cropping at the boat with them
in its hideous fury. Only the two long
tentacles succeeded in graphing it, and
one of the men, seizing his hatchet, cut
off both of them with a we'll directed
blow. The cuttle-fish then absconded
promptly, which goes to prove that the
race, though ill-tempered and savage, is
cowardly when wounded. Unfortunately,
one of the arms was destroyed before its
scientific interest was known; but the
other was brought to st. John and ex-
amined by Mr.. Harvey, who found that
the fragment alone measured nineteen
feet. Professor Verrill considers that the
total length of the animal must have been
about sixty feet. Some months later Mr..
Harvey came across yet another big cut
tletsh. This time he was lucky enough
to secure the entire animal, and to get it
properly measured, photographed and
preserved in brine. The body is eight
feet long and five feet round; the long
tentacles are twenty-four feet in length,
and the short arms six feet apiece. Each
of them has nearly hundred suckers, and
every sucker is provided with a living
piston, by means of which the creature
can create a vacuum the moment
it touches its prey, and so re-
enforce its own powerful muscles
| by all the weight of the atmosphere and
the ocean above the spot it thus fastens
upon. 'No fate could be more horri-
ble," says Mr.. Harvey, ethan to be en-
twined in the embrace of those eight
clammy corpse-like arms, and to feel
their folds creeping and gliding around
you, and the eight hundred discs, with
their cold adhesive touch, gluing them
selves to you with grasp which nothing
could relax, and feeling like so many
mouths devouring you at the same time.
Slowly the horrible arms, supple as
leather strong as steel and cold as death,
draw their prey under the awful beak,
and press it against the glutinous mass
which forms the body. The cold, Shiny
grasp paralyzes the victim with terror,
and the powerful mandibles rend and
deVour him alive"
Another Newfoundland clergyman, Mr..
Gabriel, measured two still larger squids,
cast ashore at Lamaline in 1870, in one
of which the body was forty feet long,
and in another forty seven feet. And
one of Mr.. Harvey's informants measured
specimen which was washed up by the
waves little earlier, and found it to be
eighty feetin length. Altogether, the cases
collected by this able and very trust
worthy naturalist conclusively prove that
cuttlefsh of perfectly colossal size do
really occur in considerable numbers in
the North Atlantic. - CoynhiU.