THE SEA-SERPENTS OF SCIENCE. 125 



their sources, excavations and long trenches are met with, 

 which are undoubtedly the work of some living animal. 

 Generally, if not always, they appear after continued rainy 

 weather, and seem to start from marshes or river-beds, and 

 to enter them again. The accounts as to the size and 

 appearance of the creature are very uncertain. It might be 

 suspected to be a gigantic fish allied to Lepidosiren and 

 Ceratodus; the l swine's snout,' would show some resem- 

 blance to Ceratodus, while the horns on the body rather point 

 to the front limbs of Lcpidosircn, if these particulars can be 

 at all depended upon. In any case, concludes Herr Miiller, 

 it would be worth while to make further investigations about 

 the minhocao, and, if possible, to capture it for a zoological 

 garden ! 



" To conclude this remarkable story, we may venture to 

 suggest whether, if any such animal really exist, which, upon 

 the testimony produced by Fritz Miiller, appears very 

 probable, it may not rather be a relic of the race of gigantic 

 armadilloes which in past geological epochs were so 

 abundant in Southern Brazil. The little Chlamydophoms 

 truncatus is, we believe, mainly, if not entirely, subterranean 

 in its habits. May there not still exist a large representative 

 of the same or nearly allied genus, or, if the suggestion be 

 not too bold, even a last descendant of the Glyptodonts ? " * 



*Dr. Joseph Drew details, in Nature of September 5, 1878, a case of 

 serpentine appearance in the English Channel, produced by a mass of 

 birds, probably shags, in rapid motion ; the aspect of the moving column 

 being described as resembling "an immense serpent, apparently about 

 a furlong in length, rushing furiously along at the rate of fifteen or 

 twenty miles an hour." In the same journal for September 12 one 

 correspondent relates the case of a sea-serpent which resolved itself 

 into " a bamboo, root upwards," and having weeds attached thereto. 

 Another correspondent rightly doubts, however, "whether all sea- 

 serpent stories can be thus explained;" and the correspondence in 

 question once again illustrates the necessity for carefully distinguishing 

 "between cases in which serpentine appearances have been assumed 

 by ordinary animals, and those in which one animal form has presented 

 itself in the guise of the ' great unknown.' " 



