April 3, 18S5.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



273 



AN iLLLJSTRATED 



MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE 



PlainlyWorded-ExactlyDescribed 



LOXDOX : FIUDAY, APEH. 3, ISSr.. 



COXTEXTS OF iS'o. 179. 



rxsi 

 Monster S*a-<erp«nl9. By Rii-hard 



A. Proctor 273 



The PhiloMphv of Clothing. V. 



Bj W. Mittiru Williams 27* 



Photopraphr aiui Meiiical Jurispru- 

 dence. By William Mathew 275 



Chats on Geometrical Measuremei.t. 



(/«u,.) Bt R. a. Proolor 277 



Electro-plating. XVIII. Br W. 



Slingo : 277 



Orbit o( the Son. By B. A. Proctor 278 



PireWast« 279 



Chapter* on Modem Domestic £«o- 

 nomv. XXI. (Illut.) 279 



racB 



Tricycles in 1S85. (/Hiijt.) By 



John Browning; 281 



Other Worlds than Ours 2'<2 



Simple Method of Making; I.antorn- 



Slidos. By W. J. Harrison 281 



Is the Diameter of the Pupil of 

 the Kye an E(iuivalent of the 

 Light's Intensity ? By John 



Gorham, M.K.C.S. Enc 28> 



Editorial Gossip 28li 



Reviews 287 



The Cultured Chimpanzee 283 



Correspondence 289 



Our Chess Colamn 291 



MONSTER SEA-SERPENTS.* 

 By Richard A. Proctor. 



I HAVE been gratified and ratlier amused to find a short 

 article, which I contributed more than a year since to 

 The Newcastle WeeJdi/ Chronicle on the subject of a marine 

 monster seen near Panama, appearing in the very valuable 

 report of Professor Spencer F. Baird, United States Com- 

 missioner of Fish and Fisheries. A genial article in The 

 Tribune for January 4 presents my recogDition of this 

 marine monster and defence of the sea-serpent as a tardy 

 admission on the part of science that there may be more 

 things in sea and land than had been dreamt of in an un- 

 philosophical philosophy. But so far as I am concerned there 

 has been no " ridicule, followed by denial, then by doubt, 

 and lastly by partial acceptance." I have always been 

 a believer in the sea-serpent of Capt. McQuhae, of the 

 Dcedalus. I was a very young lad when his report of the 

 strange encounter first appeared ; but it seemed to me 

 then, and it seems to me still, that the sea captain had 

 much the best of the discussion with the representatives 

 of science. There was that cautious naturalist and 

 palseontologist, Richard Owen, so anxious to disprove tlie 

 sea-serpent that he pictured to himself the captain and 

 oflficers of a British frigate frightened out of their wits, 

 and out of one at least of their senses, by the sight of a 

 sea-elephant (as he tried to make out) rather far away from 

 its native abode, and virging its course as fast as possible 

 homeward. Captain McQuhae, in a report to the 

 Admiralty, says that he and his ofBcers saw a long- 

 necked sea monster travelling swiftly in the teeth of a 

 ten-knot breeze on the surface of the sea, so quickly 

 that he could see the waves frothing against the 

 creature's chest. It passed so near that he could 

 have distinctly seen the features of a man at the 

 distance. He and his officers had a good view of the 

 creature. (For a wonder, they were not possessed by the 

 customary desire to shoot it, a desire which speaks as 

 honourably of the human race as the saying of the North 

 Country miner immortalised by Leech, who, seeing a 

 stranger, thought it due welcome to " 'eave 'arf a brick at 

 un.") They rejected the sea-elephant with derision, as 



• From the Heio York Tribune. 



entirely inconsistent with what they had clearly seen ; 

 while the idt^a of their being frightent^d — well, Americans 

 in old times tackled a few of our British frigates with 

 greater or less success, but they did not find our .seamen 

 (]uite so timorous as to bo likely to tremble in their shoea 

 at the sight even of an extra large sea-elephant. Yet Prof. 

 Onen persisted in his belief that the Dodalas sea-serpent 

 story was not worthier of credence than a story about 

 ghosts. That ])articnlar ghost he thought ho had laid. 



Since then all ports of explanations of sea-serpent stories 

 have been advanced. ISecause one caj)tain has niistaken a 

 lot of Uoating sea- wreck half a mile away for a sea mon.ster, 

 therefore the story of a s-ea creature seen swiftly advancing 

 against wind and sea, at a distance of less than 200 yards, 

 meant nothing more than misunderstood sea- weed. Another 

 mistakes a flight of birds in the distance, or a shoal of por- 

 poises, or even a i-ange of hills beyond the horizon, for sonit^ 

 sea-sepentine monster, and forthwith other accounts, how- 

 ever manifestly inconsistent with such explanations, are 

 regarded as explained away. Then, worst of all, some 

 idiot invents a sea-serpent to beguile his time and find 

 occupation for his shallow pate, and so soon as the story is 

 shown to be only a story, men of sense and standing, as 

 Incapable of the idiocy of inventing sea-monsters as I am 

 of inventing a i)lanet, are supposed to have amused their 

 leisure by sending grave reports of non-existent sea- 

 monstera to men under whom they (the seamen, not the 

 sea-monsters) held office, or by taking oath before magis- 

 trates 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 

 cameleopard, aud later in the cnse of the gorilla. Mucli 

 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 ver.icity) are always with us ; 

 and they can never admit that anything exists outside 

 what they know, or undfrstand how any traveller in little 

 known regions can fall to lie lustily when he comes home 

 again. Among the creatures thus specially ridiculed the 

 monster earth-worm described by Rapp, some forty years 

 ago, was s])ecially ridiculed, and those who believed in it, 

 or declined utterly to reject it, were sneered at just as 

 those who recognise the reasonableness of the sea-serpent 

 a'e laughed at now. Rapp said he had seen in South 

 Africa a monstrous earthworm, several feet in length. One 

 of these he described as G ft. 2 in. long, and proportionately 

 thick. The measurement was regarded as not worthier 

 of credence than Gulliver's precise 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 in. 

 in length. Here, if this lying traveller was to be believed, 

 was an animal more than twelve times as long, and there- 

 fore some 1,800 times as large. Now, the ordinary boa- 

 constrictor is about eighteen feet long. Multiply his 

 length by twelve, and we get a serpent of 21 G feet in 

 length. Credat judmis, &o. Rapp was demonstrably a 

 vendor 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 crea- 

 tures are hard to catch and keep alive ; and probably the 

 biggest are the most difficult to secure. They are described 

 as " fairly abundant in the neighbourhood of Port Eliza- 

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

 of sight unless heavy rains drive them out of their boles, 

 when hundreds of them can be seen crawling about, but 



