110 THE SEA SERPENT QUESTION REVIVED. 



many seem to imagine. Travelers are sometimes said to tell marvelous 

 stories ; but it is a noteworthy fact that in nine cases out of ten the marvel- 

 ous stories of travelers have been confirmed. Men ridiculed the tale 

 brought back by those who had sailed far to the south, that the sun there 

 moves from right to left, instead of from left to right, as you face his mid- 

 day place ; but we know that those travelers told the truth. The first ac- 

 count of the girafi"e was laughed to scorn, and it was satisfactorily proved 

 that no such creature could possibly exist. The gorilla would have been 

 ieered 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 weigl^t 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 encount- 

 ered 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), while 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 ]?^ewfoundland mon- 

 ster. The mermaid, again, has been satisfactorily identified with the man- 

 atee, or 'woman-fish,' as the Portuguese call it, which assumes, says Captain 

 Scoresby, 'such positions that the human appearance is very closely imi- 

 tated.' 



"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 speaking of the recorded observations in much such terms as I have 

 used above says : 'We may, then, af&rm safely that there are many verified 

 pieces of evidence on record of strange marine forms having been met 

 with, which evidence, judged according to ordinary and common sense 

 rules, go to prove that certain hitherto undescribed marine organisms do 

 •certainly exist in the sea depths.' As to the support which natural history 

 can give to the above proposition, 'zoologists can but admit,' he proceeds, 

 ■^the correctness of the observation. Certain organisms, and especially those 

 of the marine kind (e. g., certain whales), are known to be of exceedingly 

 rare occurrence. Our knowledge of marine reptilia is confessedly very 

 small; and, best of all, there is no counter- objection or feasible argument 

 which the naturalist can offer by way of denying the above proposition_ 

 He would be forced to admit the existence of purely marine genera of 

 -snakes which possess compressed tails, adapted for swimming, and other 

 points of organization admittedly suited for a purely equatic existence. If, 

 therefore, we admit the possibility — nay, even the reasonable probability — 

 that gigantic members of these water snakes may occasionally be developed, 

 we should state a powerful case for the assumed and probable existence of 

 a natural sea serpent. We confess we do not well see how such a chain of 

 probabilities can be readily set aside, supported as they arc in the possibil- 



