ABSENCE OF EEMA1NS. 320 



voyagers who have traversed the seas in so many directions. 

 Considering, too, the tides and currents of the ocean, it 

 seems still more reasonable to suppose that the dead sea- 

 serpent would be occasionally cast on shore. However, 

 I do not ask for the entire carcase. The structure of the 

 back-bone of the serpent tribe is so peculiar, that a single 

 vertebra would suffice to determine the existence of the 

 hypothetical Ophidian ; and this will not be deemed an 

 unreasonable request when it is remembered that the ver- 

 tebrae 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 Love'n) than those of Norway. Krakeris 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 indeterminable monster 

 they cannot show a trace. 



