326 BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 



men of sense and standing, as incapable of the idiocy of inventing sea- 

 monsters as I am of inventing a planet, are supposed to have amused 

 their leisure by sending grave reports of non-existent sea-monsters to 

 men under whom they (the seamen, not the sea-monsters) held office, or 

 by taking oath before magistrates that they had seen sea-creatures 

 which they had invented, and by parallel absurdities. 



All this has been done in the case of the sea-serpent, as something 

 akin to it was long since done in the case of the camelopard, and later 

 in the case of the gorilla. Much earlier Herodotus had been called the 

 Father of Lies instead of the Father of History, because of wonders 

 related by him which have since been shown to be facts. The poor (in 

 intellect and veracity) are always with us ; and they can never admit 

 that anything exists outside of what they know, or understand how 

 any traveler in little-known regions can fail to lie lustily when he comes 

 home again. Among the creatures thus specially ridiculed, the mon- 

 ster earthworm described by Rapp some forty years ago, was specially 

 ridiculed, and those who believed in it, or declined utterly to reject it, 

 were sneered at just as those who recognize the reasonableness of the 

 sea-serpent are laughed at now. Rapp said he had seen in South Africa 

 a monstrous earthworm, several feet in length. One of these he de- 

 scribed as 6 feet 2 inches long, and proportionately thick. The meas- 

 urement was regarded as no worthier of credence than Gulliver's pre- 

 cise statements of the height of Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian animals. 

 The absurdity and impossibility of the thing was abundantly proved. 

 A worm of the ordinary kind averages, let us say, 6 inches in length. 

 Here, if this lying traveler was to be believed, was an animal more 

 than twelve times as long, and therefore some 1,800 times as large. Now, 

 the ordinary boa-constrictor is about 18 feet long. Multiply his length 

 by twelve, and we get a serpent of 216 feet in length. Gredat Judceus, 

 &c. Rapp was demonstrably a vender of lies — so, at least, said the 

 young buccaneers of the press. Well, there is now in the Zoological 

 Gardens in London a living specimen of the species described by Rapp. 

 It is not one of the largest. Indeed, these creatures are hard to catch 

 and keep alive ; and probably the biggest are the most difficult to se- 

 cure. They are described as " fairly abundant in the neighborhood of 

 Port Elizabeth and other parts of Cape Colony," but they keep out of 

 sight unless heavy rains drive them out of their holes, when hundreds 

 of them can be seen crawling about, but they usually perish soon after 

 thus visiting the surface. The specimen at the Zoological Gardens is 

 about 5 feet long, however, so that it is quite a good-sized worm. 

 Here, then, is a case where a creature, the description of which excited 

 as much ridicule as that of the sea-serpent, is found not only to exist 

 in large numbers, but to be amenable to the customary treatment ex- 

 tended by our kindly race to the inferior races : we have captured a 

 specimen and keep it on show. 



Yet those who formerly laughed at the earthworm laugh now about 



