328 THE GREAT UNKNOWN. 



If a gigantic sea-serpent actually exists, the species must, 

 of course, have been perpetuated through successive ge- 

 nerations, from its first creation and introduction into the 

 seas of this planet. Conceive, then, the number of indi- 

 viduals that must have lived, and died, and have left 

 their remains to attest the actuality of the species during 

 the enormous lapse of time, from its beginning, to the 

 6th of August last ! Now, a serpent, being an air- 

 breathing animal, with long vesicular and receptacular 

 lungs, dives with an efibrt, and commonly floats when 

 dead ; and so would the sea-serpent, until decomposition 

 or accident had opened the tough integument, and let out 

 the imprisoned gases. Then it would sink, and, if in deep 

 water, be seen no more until the sea rendered up its 

 dead, after the lapse of the seons requisite for the yielding 

 of its place to dry land — a change which has actually re- 

 vealed to the present generation the old saurian monsters 

 that were entombed at the bottom of the ocean, of the 

 secondary geological periods of our earth's history. Dur- 

 ing life the exigencies of the respiration of the great 

 sea-serpent would always compel him frequently to the 

 surface ; and when dead and swollen — 



' Prone on the flood, extended long and large,' 



he would 



* Lie floating many a rood ; in bulk as huge. 

 As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 

 Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove.' 



Such a spectacle, demonstrative of the species if it existed, 

 has not hitherto met the gaze of any of the countless 



