CHAP. VIII.] SEA SERPENT OF HEBRIDES. 117 



vincing evidence that a carcass which was fifty-five feet long 

 could be referable to a species, the largest known individual of 

 which has never exceeded thirty-five or forty feet. But there 

 seems no escape from Home s verdict ; for the vertebrae are still 

 in the College of Surgeons, where I have seen them, quite entire, 

 and so identical with those of the Squalus vnaximus, that Mr. 

 Owen is unwilling to imagine they can belong to any other spe 

 cies of the same genus. 



Mr. Neill tells me, in his letter, that the basking shark is by 

 no means uncommon in the Orkneys, where it is called the hock- 

 mar, and a large one was killed in Stromness Harbor in 1804, 

 when he was there ; yet it was agreed by all with whom he 

 spoke in 1808, that the Stronsa animal was double the length 

 of the largest hockrnar ever stranded in their times in Orkney. 



Unfortunately, no one observed the habits and motions of the 

 monster before it was cast ashore ; but the Rev. Donald Maclean, 

 of Small Isles in the Hebrides, was requested to draw up a state 

 ment of what he recollected of the creature which had so much 

 alarmed the fishermen in the summer of the same year. Before 

 he penned his letter, which was printed as an appendix to Bar 

 clay s Memoir in 1809,^ he had clearly been questioned by per 

 sons who were under the full persuasion that what he had seen, 

 and the Stronsa animal, were identical with Pontoppidan s sea 

 serpent. Maclean informs us, that it was about the month of 

 June, 1808, when the huge creature in question, which looked 

 at a distance like a small rock in the sea, gave chase to his 

 boat, and he saw it first from the boat, and afterward from the 

 land. 



Its head was broad, of a form somewhat oval ; its neck rather 

 smaller. It moved by undulations up and down. When the 

 head was above water, its motion was not so quick ; when most 

 elevated, it appeared to take a view of distant objects It direct 

 ed its &quot; monstrous head,&quot; which still continued above water, 

 toward the boat, and then plunged violently under water in pur 

 suit of them. Afterward, when he saw it from the shore, &quot; it 

 moved off with its head above water for about half a mile 

 * Wern. Trans. vOl, i. p. 444, 



