THE GREAT SEA SERPENT. 413 



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

 that the dead sea serpent would be occasionally cast ashore. How- 

 ever, I do not ask for the entire carcass. The structure of the back- 

 bone of the serpent tribe is so peculiar, that a single vertebra would 

 be sufficient to determine the existence of the hypothetical ophidian ; 

 and this will not be deemed an unreasonable request, when it is 

 remembered that the vertebras 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 Loven), 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 they have 

 never vouchsafed a single fragment of the skeleton to any Scandinavian 

 collector, whilst the great denizens of those seas have been by no 

 means so chary. No museums, in fact, are so rich in skeletons, 

 skulls, bones, and teeth of the numerous kinds of whales, cachalots, 

 grampuses, walruses, sea-unicorns, seals, &c., as those of Denmark, 

 Norway, and Sweden, but of any large marine nondescript or in- 

 determinable 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 peculiar 

 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 

 two hundred 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, * apparently beaten to 

 death ' by some labouring people of Cape Ann, United States (see the 

 8vo. pamphlet, 1817, Boston, p. 38), and figured in the Illustrated 

 London News, October the 28th, 1848, from the original American 

 memoir, by no means satisfied the conditions of the problem. Neither 

 does the Saccopharynx of Mitchell, nor the Ophiognathus of Harwood 

 the one four and a half feet, the other six feet long. Both are sur- 

 passed by some of the congers of our own coast, and, like other 



