STEANGE SEA MONSTERS. 91 



be thus explained away were concoctions of falsehood* 

 Yet, as the naturalist Gosse long- since pointed out, in 

 his curious essay on " The Great Unknown," it Is 

 altogether unlikely that men know all the forms of 

 animals which exist in the ocean, and the antecedent 

 probability againt the theory of the existence of crea- 

 tures such as the great sea-serpent has been described 

 to be is not sufficient to outweigh the evidence which 

 has been given respecting such creatures. No one 

 who has read the account given by the officers and 

 men of the Dcedalus, for instance, can for a moment 

 suppose that they were deceived in any one of the 

 ways ingeniously imagined ; we must assume that they 

 all told untruths before we can reject the belief that 

 some as yet unknown sea creature was seen by them. 

 That creature may quite possibly not have been a 

 serpent properly so called ; the picture drawn by one 

 of the midshipmen may have been incorrect in details 

 (as Professor Owen insisted it must have been) : but, 

 unless the whole affair was a fraud, a sea animal was 

 seen which had all the appearance of a gigantic ser- 

 pent, And the idea of fraud in such matters is not 

 nearly so reasonable as many seem to imagine. Tra- 

 vellers are sometimes said to tell marvellous stories ; 

 but it is a noteworthy fact that, in nine cases out of 

 ten, the marvellous stories of travellers have been 

 confirmed. Men ridiculed the tale, brought back by 

 those who had sailed far to the South, t]iat the sun 

 there moves from right to left, instead of from left to 

 right, as you face his mid-day place ; but we now 



