In the great libraries of the country will be found books dating back to the last two centuries, many of which contain cuts and descriptions of frightful animals resembling huge spiders, called krakens, or devilfishes. They are represented climbing over ships, and hauling them down. One is described as so huge that the crew of a vessel landed upon it, not discovering that it was not an island until they had built a fire, when the supposed island, really a kraken, sank beneath them. These are tales of romancers, but it is interesting to know that they are based upon a slight foundation of fact. Devilfishes have been discovered in various seas, which weighed several hundred pounds, and whose length ranged from fifty to seventy or more feet. Such an animal is the giant squid (Fig. 115), which is a very timid animal, and though it might overturn a small boat, it is not likely to make the attempt.

These animals are called cephalopods because their feet are attached to the head; in other words, they are head-footed. The typical squid or cuttlefish has a barrel-shaped body, and a tail resembling an arrowhead. Its head is separated from the body by a seeming neck, and is provided with two immense eyes (Fig. 116). Projecting forward are two long, slender arms, and eight shorter ones, which in the giant squid are from six to ten feet in length. These are armed with peculiar suckers (Fig. 117), each of which is extremely powerful. In a specimen six feet long, which I kept for an hour alive in a large tank, some idea of the strength of a squid could be obtained. It fastened its eight arms to the tank, and with all the force I could bring to bear I was unable to tear them off. Besides the eight short arms there are two long ones.

In a specimen of the giant squid which I handled and measured, the long arms were about thirty feet in length. The ends were enlarged with paddlelike organs, and bore a group of suckers. The object of the long arms is to serve as graspers. They are kept near the body, coiled up, and can be shot out with remarkable velocity, grasping a fish like two hands with gigantic arms. They haul the prey to the short arms, when hundreds of sucking disks hold the victim that is now pressed to the remarkable mouth. This lies between the base of the arms, and in color and appearance is almost exactly like the beak of a parrot, with the exception that the under bill fits over the upper (Fig. 118). These bills almost invariably nip the struggling fish over the vertebra or back bone, severing it at once, and ending the struggle. The tongue of the squid is a ribbon with teeth upon it. Such an armament alone is sufficient to attract attention to the animal, but it has still another feature which adds to its interest as a weird and disagreeable creature. The squid has a siphon which terminates in a tube, opening beneath the head. Into this an ink bag opens (Fig. 119). In swimming, the squid rarely if ever rests upon the bottom, but takes in water around the edge of the mantle and ejects it with more or less force from the siphon, and thus the squid is driven along, tail foremost. When alarmed its movements are very rapid. If in danger, the squid pours an inky secretion, which is the sepia of commerce, into the siphon, and the secretion is swept out into the water in a cloud which spreads rapidly, to the confusion of any following enemy.

The squid has a shell, but it is very small, and internal. It is called the pen, and that of some species is the cuttlefish bone of commerce (Fig. 120). In specimens six or seven feet long, taken at Santa Catalina, California, the pen was fifteen inches long and glasslike—a perfect pen in shape. Such is this peculiar creature, and if we add that it can change its color from very dark brown to almost white, adapting it to the color of the bottom over which it rests, we can form some idea of one of the strangest of all animals. They deposit eggs in clusters.

The squids range in size from gigantic specimens seventy or more feet in length to the minute Cranchia, which is luminous at times. Some have no tails, some only the suggestion of a tail, some have very pointed ones, some very broad ones. In specimens of the little Cranchia which I observed the head was very small and the body long in proportion. One form appears to have side winglike fins. The large squids live in the deep sea, and most of the specimens known have been taken from the deep fjords of Newfoundland, which appears to be a favorite locality for them. They doubtless live everywhere in the deep seas, as they are almost invariably found in the stomach of the sperm whale, evidently constituting a favorite food of this giant-toothed whale.

The squids live mainly upon fishes, and are very skillful in taking them, poising like a cat, near the bottom, creeping upon a school of sardines,—all the time simulating the color of the bottom, and almost invisible but for their large, dark eyes standing out,—then suddenly darting tail first into the school, flinging the long arms at the flying fishes, and almost always catching one, which is dragged up to the parrotlike bill and dismembered. In the six and seven foot squids taken at Santa Catalina the stomachs were filled with seaweed, showing that at least some of these animals are vegetarians.

On all tropical shores is found a beautiful coiled shell, the Spirula, with little pearly septa dividing it. I have seen a windrow of these shells a mile long, but never found the animal and shell together, so easily are they disconnected. It is the smallest and the most beautiful of all the cephalopods.

The familiar devilfish or octopus (Fig. 122) is another form, a bottom lover, found among the rocks, rarely attempting to swim. It has a round, baglike body, often covered with soft, fleshy spines; two fiery green eyes, which always seem to emit a baneful light; eight sucker-lined arms, which can be thrown in any direction, and the beak and ink bag noticed in the squid, but no pen or shell. The octopus lives in dens or crevices in the rocks, and ranges in size from specimens a foot or two across to giants with arms having a radial spread of nearly thirty feet (Fig. 123). These large individuals are found along the Pacific coast from California to Alaska, and when caught generally make a desperate struggle for liberty and display a vast amount of strength. I once kept a number in a tank, which were two or three feet across, and when they had grasped firmly it was almost impossible to wrench them from the glass. They differed much in temper. Some would apparently play with my hand, tapping it with their tentacles, or gripping it gently. Others would crouch like miniature tigers, quivering with rage, and with green eyes shining, would spring upon it and attempt to smother it with their arms—a most disagreeable sensation, especially when it was almost impossible to remove the hand from the uncanny grasp without lacerating their flesh. One large octopus in this family, when it obtained a grip, would hold my hand firmly; hence I concluded that a specimen thirty feet across, similar to those represented by casts in the Yale and National Museums, might easily overcome a man. Yet the octopus is a very timid animal in the open water. I rarely caught them either in Florida or California, unless they were cornered, and they never attempted to bite. But I seized one in the coral, and it wound about my arm so tightly that I was obliged to wrench away twenty or more pounds of branch coral, before I could release it without laceration. When attacked the octopus changes color with great rapidity from black to gray, and when enraged it often has the appearance of a leopard. Then it hurls a cloud of ink into the water, and endeavors to slink away under this cover, gliding through crevices that would seem entirely too small to admit so large an animal.

The octopus swims when forced to do so, using a weblike membrane which is seen to connect the base of the eight arms or by forcing water from its siphon. These arms, when extended, give the octopus a faint resemblance to an umbrella without a handle, and with very long supports. The octopus preys upon very small animals, particularly crabs. I have lain among the bowlders on the shores of the Californian islands and watched the octopus hunting. They selected the flood tide and crept near the shore, moving along slowly, on the watch for a species of Grapsus very common here, a land crab which occasionally enters the water. The crabs crept down to the water's edge, and often entered, and in this moment of incaution were pounced upon by the disagreeable creature so well named the devilfish. Sometimes they were caught at the very edge; a long, livid tentacle would come shooting out of the water like a flame and seize the victim. Despite its struggles, it was soon hauled in, the octopus immediately covering it with its umbrellalike bag, doubtless bringing its nippers into play. I have seen an octopus dash out of water two or three feet and scramble up the dry rocks with remarkable speed after an escaping crab. At these times the octopus can be caught by seizing it quickly, but some experience is required before one can grasp a large octopus and retain the hold, so disagreeable is the sensation of the snakelike tentacles winding about hand and arm. The very appearance of the octopus is like a horrible dream, and so intensely repulsive is the animal that in an actual test not one person in fifty who passed a tank containing an octopus with arms a foot long and a hideous striped body, could be induced to touch the animal, though assured that it was absolutely harmless and would merely squeeze the hand.

While the devilfish is the type of all that is hideous and repulsive in nature, it has a near relative, the paper nautilus, which is a very dainty and beautiful creature. It appears to be an octopus which lives in a shell. The argonaut, as it is called, has eight short arms, the upper pair being largely developed at their tips, forming fanlike or saillike organs. It was formerly believed that these were really sails, held aloft to catch the breeze to blow the fairy argonaut along. So fixed in the public mind was this erroneous belief that illustrations in various works otherwise correct, display the argonaut in this incorrect position. The animal is the female, which, to protect and carry its eggs, is provided with a dainty shell which it secretes, but is not attached to, and would lose were it not for the two large-ended tentacles with which it grasps the beak of the shell (Fig. 124). These arms also bear the shell-making and repairing glands. The argonaut can crawl upon the rocks at the bottom, swim through the water, forced along by its siphon stream, or float calmly at the surface. About nine species are known; generally in some tropical waters. Every year a few are found stranded upon Santa Catalina Island, California.

In many of the fossil deposits are found gigantic shells resembling the wheels of a cart, and enormously heavy. These are ammonites (Figs. 125, 126), and ancestors of the nautilus (Fig. 127), another member of this wonderful family of animals, with feet attached to their heads. It has a shell of radiant pearl, divided, like the little Spirula, by pearly septa or partitions, into rooms or chambers (C) all of which surround a small tube (s) called the siphuncle. This contains a long, fleshy pedicel, hence the nautilus is attached to its shell and can not leave it. The shell chambers are filled with gas, and the animal has the power to change its specific gravity, to float or rise. The nautilus forces itself along by a current from its siphon, and in a general way resembles others of the group. It has no ink bag, and its eye is not the striking object seen in the other forms. It is merely an elevation bearing a minute hole which leads into the globe of the eye, which during the life of the nautilus is filled with water. According to Doctor Hensen, in place of a refracting lens and a cornea, the animal has an arrangement for forming an image on the principle of a pin-hole camera. We might imagine the nautilus easy to capture; but it is very timid and rarely caught. Instead of eight or ten arms the nautilus has ninety-four. The shell is a beautiful object when cleaned and polished, being a vase of pearl of a chaste and elegant design, often copied, and in great demand by native artisans who carve and engrave it, and mount it in gold and silver. The nautilus, aside from its beauty, is a most interesting animal, being the last or almost the last of its race of fifteen hundred species, which have lived in former periods of the earth. Only two are still alive, and these in all probability are doomed to extinction.