belongs to the style of writing called sensational: but the description of the creature is enough to make one's flesh creep.

“This frightful apparition," he writes, "is a greyish form, which undulates in the water. It is of the thickness of a man's arm, and in length nearly five feet. The outline is ragged Its form resembles an umbrella closed, and without handle. This irregular mass advances slowly to you. Suddenly it opens, and eight radii issue abruptly from around a face with two eyes. These radii are alive. Their undulations are like lambent flames. They resemble, when opened, the spokes of a wheel, of four or five feet in diameter, a terrible expansion. It springs upon its prey. The devil fish winds round the sufferer, covering and entangling him in its long folds. Underneath it is yellow, above a dull earthy hue. It adheres closely to its prey, and cannot be torn away-a fact which is due to its power of exhausting air. The eight antennæ, large at the roots, diminish gradually, and end in needle-like points. Underneath each of these feelers range two rows of pustules, decreasing in size, the largest near the head, the smaller at the extremities. Each row contains twenty-five of these. The creature therefore possesses four hundred of these, which are capable of being used as cupping glasses. They are capable of piercing to the depth of more than an inch. No grasp is like the sudden strain of the cephaloptera. It is with the sucking apparatus that it attacks. The victim is oppressed by a vacuum drawing at innumerable points. It is not a clawing or a biting, but an indiscribable scarification. The talons of the wild beast enter into your flesh, but with the cephaloptera it is you who enter into the creature. The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contracted, the skin cracks under the

loathsome oppression, the blood spirts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to the victim by innumerable hideous mouths. He draws you to him, and into himself: while bowed down, glued to the ground, powerless, you feel yourself gradually emptied into this horrible pouch, which is the monster itself." (Hugo, "Toilers of the deep.")

Another "strange fish," which well deserves the name, is the Gymnotus, sometimes called the electrical eel. The Gymnotus is not more than five or six feet in length, having a head rather broad and depressed, and a body stouter in proportion to its length, than that of the eel. It is generally of a brownish black colour, by no means a taking animal to look at, and it is found nowhere but in the rivers of South America.

It was on the banks of the Oroonoko that Baron Humboldt had the opportunity of seeing this creature, and thoroughly testing its powers. He found a good deal of difficulty in accomplishing this latter, or even in procuring a specimen, as the shock which it administers, when first touched, is enough to paralyze a horse, and the Indians are very unwilling to encounter it. "They believe, indeed," writes Humboldt, "that the gymnoti may be touched with impunity by a man chewing tobacco, but their faith in this precaution is not practical." After long debate it was agreed that a number of horses should be driven into the pool, and receive the first shocks, after which the gymnoti might be handled with impunity. Accordingly about thirty wild horses and mules were hunted down from the savannah by the Indians, and forced to enter the water. The scene which ensued is thus described by Humboldt. "The extraordinary noise caused by the horses' hoofs, makes the fish issue from the mud, and excites them to

combat. These yellowish and livid eels, resembling aquatic serpents, swim on the surface of the water, and crowd under the bellies of the horses and mules. A contest between animals of so different an organisation furnishes a very striking spectacle The Indians, provided with harpoons and long slender reeds, surround the pool closely, and some climb upon the trees, the branches of which extend horizontally over the surface of the water: by their wild cries and the length of the reeds they prevent the horses from running away, and reaching the bank of the pool. The eels, stunned by the noise, defend themselves by the repeated discharge of their electric batteries. During a long time they seem to prove victorious; several horses sink beneath the violence of the invisible strokes, which they receive from all sides, in organs the most essential to life, and, stunned by the force and frequency of the shocks, disappear under the water others, panting, with mane erect and haggard eyes, expressing anguish, raise themselves and endeavour to flee from the storm by which they are overtaken. They are driven back by the Indians into the middle of the water: but a small number succeed in eluding the active vigilance of the fishermen. These regain the shore stumbling at every step, and stretch themselves on the sand, exhausted with fatigue, and their limbs benumbed with the electrical shocks of the gymnoti."

In less than five minutes two horses were drowned. The eel being five feet long, and pressing itself against the bellies of the horses, makes a discharge along the whole extent of its electric organ; the horses were probably not killed, only stunned. They were drowned from the impossibility of rising amid the prolonged struggle of the horses and the eels. When the gymnoti have expended their electric energy, they approach timidly the edge of the marsh, where they are taken by means

of small harpoons fastened to long cords: when the cords are very dry, the Indians feel no shock in raising the fish in the air. In this manner several were captured, and carefully examined by our travellers. Some of them measured five feet three inches in length, and the Indians assert that they are sometimes seen of much greater length. The Gymnotus is the largest of electrical fishes, and its action is so powerful, that Humboldt says, "he does not remember ever to have received from the discharge of a large Leyden jar a more dreadful shock than that which he experienced by imprudently placing his foot on a Gymnotus just taken out of the water." ("Marit. and Inl. Discov." III. 257.)

CHAPTER XXI.

THE SEA SERPENT.

THE most celebrated of all the monsters of the deep is one not hitherto mentioned, the Sea-serpent-whose existence has been affirmed and denied with equal pertinacity for a long period of years. Nor can the question be regarded as being even now clearly determined. It appears doubtful also whether -supposing we are to admit that there really is such an animal as travellers by sea have described—it is to be accounted as a reptile or a fish. Its proper place therefore is between these two descriptions of creatures.

The belief in the existence of the sea-serpent is a very ancient one. It is not certain what marine animal Pliny meant to describe under the name of pristis, and Ælian's description is equally obscure. But so far as we can gather anything definite, it is some sort of sea-serpent, of which he speaks. Pliny mentions it as distinct from the whale, and as being of enormous size, two hundred cubits being the length to which he says it attains. The ship called the pristis, from its supposed resemblance to the creature, is represented as being very long and narrow. Ælian and Solinus in a great measure repeat Pliny's statements. Coming down to later times, Olaus Magnus the Swede, in the early part of the 16th century, affirms that "those who visit the coasts of Norway tell us of a very strange phenomenon,--namely, that there is in those seas a