136 president's address. 



Sir Arthur Brooke; and tlie reports of the intelligent American 

 eje-witnesses, collected and examined by Sir Charles Ljell. Sir 

 Charles states, that when in America, he believed in the existence 

 of the sea-serpent, but, on his return to England, he relapsed into 

 the incredulity which is, as I have hinted, too much in vogue with 

 British philosophers, and required, as Professor Owen requires, 

 the evidence of some portion of the skeleton of the animal cast 

 on the shore. But is this reasonable? Fossil animals, submerged 

 in scalding mud by some catastrophe of our planet, and petrified 

 in the course of ages, may now be preserved through all time; 

 but how soon do the remains of a recent skeleton waste away on 

 exposure. We have no doubt of the existence of wolves and 

 beavers in our northern country, not more than a few centuries 

 ago, yet we do not find any skeleton or bone of them in our fields ; 

 and I cannot think, therefore, that it is a reasonable test to 

 require of the existence of sea-serpents at the present day, or of 

 the traditionary worms in former times, that we have none of their 

 remains to submit to the osteologist. Let me give another instance 

 in which I think we may find a foundation of truth in what 

 naturalists of late have rejected as fabulous ; I mean the unicorn. 

 Whenever that animal is written of, it is now said to refer to the 

 rhinoceros ; and that the one-horned Indian ass of the ancients is 

 mere fiction. In the edition of Pliny, published in Paris, in 1829, 

 there is an elaborate note by Cuvier, in which he says that the 

 English seem more desirous than any other people of finding the 

 unicorn in nature, because it is one of the supporters of the royal 

 arms ; and he considers that what has been taken for a unicorn, 

 has either been an imperfect representation of the rhinoceros or 

 an animal with two horns, as the Oryx, shown in profile. As to 

 this, I would refer you to the engravings of the obelisk in the 

 Nineveh antiquities, of which a copy is in the Newcastle library. 

 There is, in one row of animals, a bull, a unicorn, and an animal 

 of the stag kind. The unicorn has its single horn projecting 

 from the forehead, not from the nose, as the rhinoceros has ; it is 

 less bulky than the wild bull, whereas the rhinoceros would be 

 bulkier; and the Assyrian artist never meant to show a profile 

 view of a pair of horns, because he has tried to represent in the 



