114 THE OCEAN 



tended scientific account of such sea-monsters 

 was printed. This account was written by 

 Pontoppidan in his ''Natural History of Nor- 

 way," an English edition of which was printed 

 in London. The author was a clergyman and 

 bishop and evidently took great care to inves- 

 tigate the authenticity of the accounts he had 

 heard. In fact he himself doubted the exist- 

 ence of a sea-serpent until so much affirmative 

 evidence was produced that he was convinced 

 that such creatures existed, and he called scep- 

 tics "enemies of credulity," and in his book 

 he quotes many sworn statements of persons 

 who had seen the monster. 



Pontoppidan claimed that the sea-serpent 

 sheds its skin like true snakes and stated that 

 a cast-off skin was found at Kopperwiig and 

 used as a table cover. He also mentions the 

 fact that the sea-snake laid a week in a creek 

 in the vicinity and left the old skin behind. 

 In 1742 Hans Egede published a "Natural 

 History of Greenland" in which he tells of a 

 marvellous sea-monster which was observed in 

 Davis Strait. He states that "it was such an 

 exceedingly large animal that when it raised 



