THE GREAT SEA SERPENT. 411 



boscidea, or Phoca leonina, is thus borne off to a distance from its 

 native shore, it is compelled to return for rest to its floating abode, 

 after it has made its daily excursion in quest of fishes or squids that 

 constitute its food. It is thus brought by the iceberg into the latitude 

 of the Cape, and perhaps further north, before the berg has melted 

 away. Then the poor seal is compelled to swim as long as strength 

 endures ; and in such a predicament I imagine the creature was that 

 Mr. Sartoris saw rapidly approaching the Dcedalus from before the 

 beam, scanning, probably, its capabilities as a resting-place as it 

 paddled its long stiff body past the ship. In doing so it would raise 

 a head of the form and colour described and delineated by Captain 

 M'Quhas, supported on a neck also of the diameter given, the thick 

 neck passing into an inflexible trunk, the longer and coarser hair on 

 the upper part of which would give rise to the idea, especially if the 

 species were the Phoca leonina explained by the similes above cited. 

 The organs of locomotion would be out of sight. The pectoral fins 

 being set very low down, as in my sketch, the chief impelling force 

 would be the action of the deeper immersed terminal fins and tail, 

 which would create a long eddy readily mistakable by one looking 

 at the strange phenomena, with a sea serpent in his mind's eye, for 

 an indefinite prolongation of the body. It is very probable that not 

 one on board the Dcedalus ever before beheld a gigantic seal freely 

 swimming in the open ocean. Entering unexpectedly from that vast 

 and commonly blank waste of waters, it would be a strange and 

 exciting spectacle, and might well be interpreted as a marvel ; but 

 the creative power of the human mind appears to be really very limited, 

 and on all the occasions where the true source of the * great unknown ' 

 has been detected whether it has proved to be a file of sportive 

 porpoises, or a pair of gigantic sharks old Pontoppidan's sea serpent 

 with the mane has uniformly suggested itself as the representative of 

 the portent until the mystery has been unravelled. 



" The vertebras of the sea-serpent described and delineated in the 

 ' Wernerian Transactions,' vol. i., and sworn to by the fishermen who 

 saw it off the Isle of Stronsa (one of the Orkneys) in 1808, two of 

 which vertebrae are in the museum of the College of Surgeons, are 

 certainly those of a great shark of the genus Selache, and are not 

 distinguishable from those of the species called basking-shark, of 

 which individuals from thirty feet to thirty-five feet in length have 

 been from time to time captured or stranded on our coasts. 



" I have no unmeet confidence in the exactitude of my interpretation 

 of the phenomena witnessed by the captain and others of the Dadalus. 



