SOME GIANT FISHES OF THE SEAS 



By Hugh M. Smith 



. U. S. Deputy Commissioner cf Fisheries 



BELIEF in the existence of sea 

 serpents and other marine mon- 

 sters goes back to a very remote 

 antiquity and may be as old as man him- 

 self. That great Hebrew poem which 

 we call the Book of Job has much to say 

 .about the "leviathan." This creature has 

 been the subject of much speculation and 

 may have been a myth, but there is noth- 

 ing inherently improbable in its being a 

 giant fish, and the following scriptural 

 account might well have been written 

 yesterday instead of three thousand years 

 ago: 



Canst thou draw out leviathan with a fish- 

 hook? 



Or press down his tongue with a cord? 



Canst thou put a rope into his nose? 



Or pierce his jaw through with a hook? 



Shall the bands of fishermen make traffic of 

 him ? 



Shall they part him among the merchants? 



Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, 



Or his head with fish-spears ? 



Lay thy hand upon him : 



Remember the battle, and do so no more. 



Who knows that primitive man may 

 not have been coeval with some formid- 

 able marine creatures now extinct, the 

 tradition of which has come down 

 through the ages and left its impress on 

 the mind of the present generation ? The 

 avidity and credulity with which the gen- 

 eral public year after year receives news- 

 paper accounts, which are purely ficti- 

 tious or hang on slender threads of fact, 

 portraying the capture or sighting of 

 creatures of impossible form, show how 

 firmly established and deep-seated is the 

 conviction that the sea contains levia- 

 thans not yet known to science. Every 

 season yields a fresh crop of sea-serpent 

 stories and a new series of grotesque 

 pictures of creatures which, if they really 

 existed, would revolutionize our ideas of 

 the animal kingdom. The writer has 

 personally followed to their lairs two or 

 three of the most horrible monsters con- 



ceived by the vivid imagination of the 

 newspaper man, and found them to be 

 well-known animals with little to suggest 

 the sea serpent. 



As to whether there really exist in the 

 sea today strange monsters, scientists are 

 not wholly in accord, although a negative 

 view is held by most of them. The very 

 circumstantial account of the sighting of 

 a "sea serpent" on the Asiatic coast by 

 the French gunboat Decidce a few years 

 ago, as published in the journals at the 

 time, will perhaps weaken the belief of 

 some intelligent persons who have here- 

 tofore denied the possibility of the exist- 

 ence at this day of marine monsters 

 comparable to those of geological times. 



Whatever may be the truth as to the 

 existence of such creatures, there are 

 well-known members of the fish class 

 which are so large that they deserve to 

 be regarded as monsters, and may be the 

 basis of some of the sea-serpent yarns 

 with which the world has been regaled 

 for centuries. 



Among the serpentiform fishes there is 

 none of such exceptionally large size as 

 properly to belong in the sea-serpent 

 class, although some deserve to be con- 

 sidered as giants among eels. If any 

 known fishes may be suspected of aspir- 

 ing to be sea serpents, surely they are 

 the morays, although a sea serpent only 

 30 feet long would hardly satisfy present- 

 day requirements, and no morays have 

 yet been recorded which were half so 

 long. They have, however, been known 

 to exceed 10 feet in length, and they are 

 among the most dreaded of fishes, having 

 formidable teeth and showing a dispo- 

 sition to attack men. 



THE SUN-FISH 



A fish of such peculiar form that the 

 Italians call it mola, a millstone, and the 

 Spaniards pes lunct, moon-fish, is known 

 to Americans and English as the sun-fish, 



