Feb. lo, 1881J 



NA TURE 



339 



reappearing almost immediately some hundred yards ahead. The 

 body was not visible at all, nnd must have been some depth 

 under water, as the disturbance on the surface was too slight to 

 attract notice, although oricisitiiially a splash was seen at some 

 distance behind the head. Tlie shape of the head was not unlike 

 pictures of the dragon I have often seen, with a bulldog al>pear- 

 ance of the forehead and eyebro^o. When the monster had 

 drawn its head sufficiently out of the water it let itself drop, as 

 it were, like a huge log of wood, prior to diir ting forward under the 

 water. This motion caused a splash of about fifteen feet in 

 height on either ade of the neck, much in the sliape of a pair of 

 wings." 



The italics in the foregoing and in the account of Capt. Cox 

 are my own. 



Fig. I — 1 lie Anim i 



' ll'askingtoi 



The engraving being a large one, of which the foreground is 

 formed by the deck of the steamer, I have copied and send with 

 this that portion of it which shows the animal; and in this it 

 should be observed that besides the splash rising round the neck 

 "like wings," the separate splash at some distance behind the 

 head is also shown, the position of which corresponds to that 

 where the cetacean tail occurs in the figure sent by the captain 

 of the Kiushiu-maru, which accompanied my first letter. The 

 foam around the neck, I think, may be due to the splash of the 

 humeroid paddles which a cetacean should possess. 



Fic. 2.— The Animal ; 



ifrom H.M.S. D<r,1a, 



The sub-editor of the Graphic has also been kind enough to 

 obtain for me tracings from the three figures given in the Illus- 

 trated News of October 28, 1848, of the animal seen from the 

 Divdahis. From two of these I have made the accompanjing 

 reductions to one-fourth (linear) of the originals ; and tlie head 

 portrayed in one of these (as seen when the animal passed close 

 under the stern of the Daedalus) is evidently not reptilian, but 

 mammalian ; and it seens to bear out the "bulldog appearance 

 of the forehead and eyebrow " which Major Senior describes in 

 his case. 



Fig. 3.— Head o( ihe Anii 



From the Times of September 24, 1879, I cut the following 

 notice : — 



"Capt. J. F. Cox, master (jf the British ship Privateer, which 

 arrived at Delaware breakwater on the 9th inst. from London, 

 says: — 'On the 5ih ult., 100 miles west of Brest (France), 

 weather line and clear, at 5 p.m., as I was walling the quarter- 

 deck, looking to windward, I saw something black rise out of 

 the water about twenty feet, in shape like an immense snake about 

 three feet in diameter. It was about 300 yards from the ship, 

 coming towards us. It turned its head partly from us, andivent 

 dotvn with a great splash, after staying up about five seconds, but 

 rose again three times at intervals of ten seconds, until it had 

 Lurned completely from us and was going from us with great 



s-pteA, and making the zuater Iwl all round it. I could see its 

 eyes and shape perfectly. Itwas like a great eil or snake, b:it 

 as black as coal tar, and appeared to be making great exertions 

 to get away from ihe ship. I have seen many kinds of fish in 

 five different oceans, but was never favoured with a sight of the 

 great sea-snake before.'" 



In this account we have almost a duplicate of that of Major 

 Senior in the dnip|iing of the animal with a great splash into the 

 water prior to its darting forward under it ; v\hile the boiling of 

 the water around, which is so inconsistent with the motion of a 

 snake in water (which I have more than once seen) evidently 

 resulted from the strokes of the cetacean tail, and possibly also 

 from those of the p.iddlcs, as in the case witnes-ed by Major 

 Senior. The black colour also is described in botli cases. 



Capt. Drevar, the statutary declaration of whom and of several 

 of his crew I quoted in my former letter, has written to me, and 

 sent me a printed account (which he says he has circulated) of 

 the conflict which he witnessed, and of the subsequent appear- 

 ance of the animal rearing its long neci- out of the water. This 

 is satisfactory as showing that ihe declaration I quoted was no 

 hoax, as I feared it might have been ; but Capt. Drevar rejects 

 with disdain my suggestion that the animal he saw was not a 

 serpent, though I pLinted out to him that nothing having the 

 form of a snake would possess in its submerged portion the 

 buoyancy necessary to enable it to elevate so great a proportion 

 of its length out of waier. 



Judging from the figures which accompany this and my 

 previous letter, it appears to me thit the external form of the 

 animal must resemble the well-known Fleisosanru!, if we 

 imagine the binder (femuroid) paddles of that Enaliosatirian to 

 be absent, and a cetacean tail (which is their homologue), to be 

 present in their stead. Since in the direction of the Porpesse 

 the cetacean in external form so closely simulates the fish, so it 

 may in another direction simulate this Mcozoic marine saurian, 

 or the gigantic Elasmosaurus of the American Cretaceous for- 

 mations, of w hich a nearly perfect skeleton is described by Prof. 

 Cope as forty-five feet in length, the neck constituting twenty- 

 two of this length. 



Whether, through your circulation, any light on this subject, so 

 far as the character of the skeleton of Zcitglodon cetoides is 

 concerned, may be forthcoming from American palKontologists 

 remains to be seen ; but there ought, I submit, to remain no 

 longer with naturalists any doubt that a hitherto unknown group 

 of carnivorous cetaceans, with necks of extraordinai-y length, 

 inhaliit the ocean. 



It seems to me also most probable that the conflicts which 

 have been so often witnessed (and which Mr. Pascoe in his letter 

 in N.-\TURE, vol. xxiii. p. 35, says he himself twice witnessed), 

 and referied to the Thresher, have been attacks by the animals 

 in question upon whales. Searles V. Wood 



Martlesham near Woodbridge 



Ice Intrusive in Peat 



I HAVE just returned from a walk on the shore at Crosby, 

 where I have been much interested in observing one of the effects 

 of the late severe frost combined with the present thaw. 



At the Alt Mouth is a submarine peat-and-forest-bed, and, 

 lying over it, I was much surprised to see innumerable slabs of 

 peat, which an exarnination showed in most cases contained 

 iiiterlaminations of ice. One slab measm-ed 5 yards by 2* yards 

 by aVjout S inches thick, and right through its mass in a parallel 

 plane with the surface, separating the peat into an upper .and 

 lower layer, was a slab of transparent ice, wedge-shaped, being 

 4 inches thick at one side, diminishing to i inch at the other. 

 How the ice got there wns the surprising thing, as the peat is 

 very hard and compact, and about 18 inches thick. The holes 

 or places from which the sea had quarried these frozen slabs 

 were plainly to be seen, and I noticed round one of them that 

 the edges or lips of the peat had been forced up by ice inserting 

 itself between the laminae. 



A good deal of water ordinarily oozing through the sandhills 

 flows or trickles over the surface of the peat, and as nearly six 

 inches of rain fell in December last, ai.d the two pi evious months 

 were wet, the quantity of water would be abnormally increased. 

 In some » ay or other it must have percolated along the peaty 

 lamii.a', and by gradual accretion the frozen water has forced up 

 the layer of peat above it. This has occurred at neaps, and the 

 late high tides, assisted by the thaw and the decreased specific 

 gravity" of the mass, has lifted the frozen slabs of peat and 



