92 NATURE STUDIES. 



know that those travellers told the truth. The first 

 account of the giraffe was laughed to scorn, and it 

 was satisfactorily proved that no such creature could 

 possibly exist. The gorilla would have been jeered 

 out of existence but for the fortunate arrival of a 

 skeleton of his at an early stage of our acquaintance 

 with that prepossessing cousin of ours. Monstrous 

 cuttle-fish were thought to be monstrous lies, till the 

 Alecton, in 1861, came upon one, and captured its 

 tail, whose weight of forty pounds led naturalists to 

 estimate the entire weight of the creature at four 

 thousand pounds, or nearly a couple of tons. In 

 1873, again, two fishermen encountered a gigantic 

 cuttle in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, whose arms 

 were about thirty-five feet in length (the fishermen 

 cut off from one arm a piece twenty-five feet long), 

 whilst its body was estimated at sixty feet in length 

 and five feet in diameter so that the Devil-fish of 

 Victor Hugo's famous story was a mere baby cuttle 

 by comparison with the Newfoundland monster. The 

 mermaid, again, has been satisfactorily identified with 

 the manatee, or " woman-fish/' as the Portuguese 

 call it, which assumes, says Captain Scoresby, " such 

 positions that the human appearance is very closely 

 imitated." 



As for stories of sea-serpents, naturalists have been 

 far less disposed to be incredulous than the general- 

 public. Dr. Andrew Wilson, for instance, after speak- 

 ing of the recorded observations in much such terms 

 as I have used above, says : ' ( We may, then, affirm 



