4 io SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED. 



approximation made to the total length of the animal as (at the very 

 least) sixty feet. This is the only part of the description, however, 

 which seems to me to be so uncertain as to be inadmissible in an 

 attempt to arrive at a right conclusion as to the nature of the animal, 

 The more certain characters of the animal are these : Head with a 

 convex, moderately capacious cranium, short obtuse muzzle, gape of 

 the mouth not extending further than to beneath the eye, which is 

 rather small, round, filling closely the palpebral aperture ; colour, dark 

 brown above, yellowish white beneath, surface smooth, without scales, 

 scutes, or other conspicuous modifications of the hard and naked 

 cuticle. And the captain says, ' Had it been a man of my acquaintance, 

 I should have easily recognised his features with my naked eye.' 

 Nostrils not mentioned, but indicated in the drawing by a crescentic 

 mark at the end of the nose or muzzle. All these are the characters 

 of the head of a warm-blooded mammal, none of them those of a 

 cold-blooded reptile or fish. Body long, dark brown, not undulating, 

 without dorsal or other apparent fins, but something like the mane of 

 a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its back. The 

 character of the integuments would be a most important one to the 

 zoologist in the determination of the class to which the above defined 

 creature belonged. If an opinion can be deduced as to the integu- 

 ments from the above indication, it is that the species had hair, which, 

 if it was too short and close to be distinguished on the head, was visible 

 where it usually is the longest, on the middle line of the shoulders or 

 advanced part of the back, where it was not stiff and upright, like the 

 rays of a fin, but washed about. Guided by the above interpretation 

 of the mane of a horse or a bunch of seaweed, the animal was not a 

 cetaceous mammal, but rather a great sea seal. But what seal of large 

 size, or indeed of any size, would be encountered in latitude 24 44' 

 south, and longitude 9 22' east, viz., about 300 miles from the western 

 shore of the southern end of Africa ? The most likely species to be 

 there met are the largest of the seal tribe, e.g., Anson's sea-lion, or that 

 known to the southern whalers by the name of the * sea-elephant,' the 

 Phoca proboscidea^ which attains the length of from twenty to thirty 

 feet. These great seals abound in certain of the islands of the southern 

 and antarctic seas, from which an individual is occasionally floated off 

 upon an iceberg. The sea-lion exhibited in London last spring, which 

 was a young individual of the Phoca proboscidea, was actually captured 

 in that predicament, having been carried by the currents that set 

 northward towards the Cape, where its temporary resting-place was 

 rapidly melting away. When a large individual of the Phoca pro- 



