228 PLEASANT WAYS IN SCIENCE. 



When all the evidence is carefully weighed, we appeal 

 led to the conclusion that at least one large marine animal 

 exists which has not as yet been classified among the known 

 species of the present era. It would appear that this 

 animal has certainly a serpentine neck, and a head small 

 compared with its body, but large compared with the 

 diameter of the neck. It is probably an air-breather and 

 warm-blooded, and certainly carnivorous. Its propulsive 

 power is great and apparently independent of undulations 

 of its body, wherefore it presumably has powerful concealed 

 paddles. All these circumstances correspond with the 

 belief that it is a modern representative of the long-neck 

 plesiosaurians of the great secondary or mesozoic era, a 

 member of that strange family of animals whose figure has 

 been compared to that which would be formed by drawing a 

 serpent through the body of a sea-turtle. 



Against this view sundry objections have been raised, 

 which must now be briefly considered. 



In the first place, Professor Owen pointed out that the 

 sea-saurians of the secondary period have been replaced in 

 the tertiary and present seas by the whales and allied races. 

 No whales are found in the secondary strata, no saurians 

 in the tertiary. " It seems to me less probable," he says, 

 " that no part of the carcase of such reptiles should have 

 ever been discovered in a recent unfossilized state, than 

 that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of 

 a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal which might 

 only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard 

 the negative evidence from the utter absence of any of the 

 recent remains of great sea-serpents, krakens, or enaliosauria, 

 as stronger against their actual existence, than the positive 

 statements which have hitherto weighed with the public 

 mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evi- 

 dence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of 

 ghosts than of the sea-serpent." 



To this it has been replied that genera are now known 

 to exist, as the C/u'mara, the long-necked river tortoise, and 



