408 SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED. 



some sea running. EDGAR DRUMMOND, Lieut. H.M.S. Dadalns; 

 Southampton, Oct. 28, 1848." 



Statements so interesting and important, of course, 

 elicited much correspondence and controversy. Mr. J. D. 

 Morries Stirling, a director of the Bergen Museum, wrote to 

 the Secretary of the British Admiralty, Captain Hamilton, 

 R.N., saying that while becalmed in a yacht between 

 Bergen and Sogne, in Norway, he had seen, three years 

 previously, a large fish or reptile of cylindrical form (he 

 would not say " sea serpent ") ruffling the otherwise smooth 

 surface of the fjord. No head was visible. This appears 

 to have been, like the others from the same locality, a 

 large calamary. Mr. Stirling, unaware, doubtless, that 

 Mr. Edward Newman, editor of the Zoologist, had pre- 

 viously propounded the same idea, suggested that the 

 supposed serpent might be one of the old marine reptiles, 

 hitherto supposed only to exist in the fossil state. This 

 letter was published in the Illustrated News of October 28th, 

 and four days afterwards, November 2nd, a letter signed 

 F. G. S. appeared in the Times, in which the same idea 

 was mooted, and the opinion expressed that it might be 

 the Plesiosaurus. This brought out that great master in 

 physiology, Professor Owen, who in a long, and it is 

 needless to say, most able letter, which was published in 

 the Times of the nth of November, 1848, set forth a series 

 of weighty arguments against belief in the supposed serpent, 

 which cannot properly be abridged, and which I therefore 

 quote in edtenso, as follows : 



" The sketch (a reduced copy of the animal seen by Captain M'Quha?, 

 attached to the submerged body of a large seal, showing the long eddy 

 produced by the action of the terminal flippers) will suggest the reply 

 to your query, ' Whether the monster seen from the Dcedalus be any- 

 thing but a saurian ? ' If it be the true answer, it destroys the romance 



