462 Miscellaneous. 



requisite for the yielding of its place to dry land — a change which 

 has actually revealed to the present generation the old saurian mon- 

 sters that were entombed at the bottom of the ocean of the secondary 

 geological periods of our earth's history. During life, the exigencies 

 of the respiration of the great sea-serpent would always compel him 

 frequently to the surface ; and when dead and swollen — 



" Prone on the flood, extended long and large, 

 he would 



" Lay floating many a rood ; in bulk as huge 

 As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 

 Titanian or earth-born that wan'd on Jove." 



Such a spectacle, demonstrative of the species if it existed, has not 

 hitherto met the gaze of any of the countless voyagers who have 

 traversed the seas in so many directions. Considering, too, the 

 tides and currents of the ocean, it seems still more reasonable to 

 suppose that the dead sea-serpent would be occasionally cast on 

 shore. However, I do not ask for the entire carcase. The struc- 

 ture of the back-bone of the serpent tribe is so peculiar, that a single 

 vertebra would suffice to determine the existence of the hypothetical 

 Ophidian ; and this will not be deemed an unreasonable request, 

 when it is remembered that the vertebrae are more numerous in 

 serpents than in any other animals. Such large, blanched, and 

 scattered bones on any sea-shore would be likely to attract even 

 common curiosity; yet there is no vertebra of a serpent larger than 

 the ordinary pythons and boas in any museum in Europe. 



Few sea-coasts have been more sedulously searched, or by more 

 acute naturalists (witness the labours of Sars and Lov^n), than those 

 of Norway. Krakens and sea-serpents ought to have been living 

 and dying thereabouts from long before Pontoppidan's time to our 

 day, if all tales were true ; yet have they never vouchsafed a single 

 fragment of their skeleton to any Scandinavian collector ; whilst the 

 other great denizens of those seas have been by no means so chary. 

 No museums, in fact, are so rich in the skeletons, skulls, bones, and 

 teeth of the numerous kinds of whales, cachalots, grampuses, wal- 

 ruses, sea-unicorns, seals, &c., as those of Denmark, Norway, and 

 Sweden ; but of any large marine nondescript or indeterminable 

 monster they cannot show a trace. 



I have inquired repeatedly whether the natural- history collections 

 of Boston, Philadelphia, or other cities of the United States, might 

 possess any unusually large ophidian vertebrae, or any of such pecu- 

 liar form as to indicate some large and unknown marine animal ; 

 but they have received no such specimens. 



The frequency with which the sea-serpent has been supposed to 

 have appeared near the shores and harbours of the United States 

 has led to its being specified as the " American Sea Serpent ;" yet 

 out of the 200 vertebrae of every individual that should have lived 

 and died in the Atlantic since the creation of the species, not one 

 has yet been picked up on the shores of America. The diminutive 

 snake, less than a yard in length, " killed upon the sea-shore," ap- 

 parently beaten to death, " by some labouring people of Cape Ann," 

 United States (see the 8vo pamphlet, 1817, Boston, page 38), and 



