292 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



some twelve or fifteen feet in length ; and one of the 

 illustrations of The Romance of Natural History was a 

 conjectural drawing of the living " sea-serpent," constructed 

 on the Enaliosaurian hypothesis. In the body of the book 

 he gave a searching analysis of the more or less vague 

 reports made by unscientific, but apparently honest persons, 

 who had seen " the sea-serpent " from ship-board, and he 

 strove to show that all these stories, taken in combination, 

 tended to point conclusively to the existence of such a 

 survival as he suggested. 



The theory was worked out with great fullness, and the 

 ingenuity of a special pleader. The naturalists followed 

 it with amusement and interest. Darwin was by no means 

 inclined to reject it, as a very possible hypothesis, but 

 Professor Owen hotly contested it in favour of a theory of 

 his own, that the " sea-serpent " would really prove to be a 

 very large seal. It is rather odd that after thirty years 

 the question should still be left wholly unanswered, 

 especially as vague reports of a monster seen in mid-ocean 

 continue occasionally to reach the papers. I am not aware 

 that any suggestion more tenable than my father's has yet 

 been propounded, and more extraordinary things have 

 been laughed at when they were first foreshadowed and 

 have ultimately proved to be true. Considering the stir 

 that was made about this " sea-serpent " disquisition when 

 it was originally published, it is not a little surprising that 

 fifteen or twenty years later a popular writer on science 

 should have had the effrontery to steal the whole thing, 

 plesiosaurus hypothesis, examination of evidence, and even 

 the very words of Philip Gosse's arguments, and to put it 

 forth as a little theory of his own. The perpetrator 

 survived my father, by a strange coincidence, only a few 

 days, and as he is dead, I need not mention his name. 



The Romance of Natural History was not published 



