330 THE GEEAT UNKNOWN. 



" 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 re- 

 ceived 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, page 88,) and figured in 

 the Illustrated London News, October 28, 1848, from the 

 original American memoir, by no means satisfies the con- 

 ditions of the problem. Neither does the Saccopharynx 

 of Mitchell, nor the Opldognathus of Harwood — the one 

 four and a half feet, the other six feet long : both are 

 surpassed by some of the congers of our own coasts, and, 

 like other mursenoid fishes and the known small sea- 

 snake, (Hydrophis,) swim by undulatory movements of 

 the body 



" The fossil vertebrae and skull which were exhibited 

 by Mr Koch, in New York and Boston, as those of the 

 great sea-serpent, and which are now in Berlin, belonged 



