118 SEA SERPENT OF HEBRIDES. [CHAP. VIII. 



before he lost sight of it. Its length he believed to be from 

 seventy to eighty feet.&quot; &quot; About the same time the crews of 

 thirteen fishing boats, off the island of Canna, were terrified by 

 this monster ; and the crew of one boat saw it coming toward 

 them, between Rum and Canna, with its head high above 

 water.&quot;* 



Mr. Maclean adds, evidently in answer to a question put by 

 his correspondent, thaft he saw nothing of the mane ; arid adds, 

 &quot; when nearest to me it did not raise its head wholly above water, 

 so that the neck being under water, I could perceive no shining 

 filaments thereon, if it had any.&quot; And he also observes : &quot;It 

 had 110 fin that I could perceive, and seemed to me to move 

 progressively by undulations up and down.&quot; Most of my read 

 ers are probably satisfied by this time, that if nothing had come 

 down to us but oral testimony, or even published accounts with 

 out figures respecting the creature seen in the Hebrides in 1808, 

 as well as that afterward stranded in Orkney, we should all of 

 us have felt sure that both of them were one and the same mon 

 ster, and no other than the sea snake of Pontoppidan, or that so 

 often seen on the eastern coast of North America. How much 

 delusion in this case has been dispelled by the preservation of a 

 few bones ! May we not then presume that other sea serpents 

 were also sharks ? If so, how are we to reconcile recorded ap 

 pearances with this hypothesis ? It was justly remarked by Dr. 

 Fleming, in his British Animals, 1828 (p. 174), that Maclean s 

 account of a creature, which raised its head above the water and 

 viewed distant objects, was opposed to the idea of its being refer 

 able to the class of cartilaginous fishes, for no shark lifts its head 

 out of the sea as it swims. E may also remark, that the de 

 scriptions commonly given, both by the Norwegians and North 

 Americans, would agree better with the appearance of a large 

 seal with a marie, chased by a shoal of porpoises, than with a shark. 



But when we question the evidence more closely, we must 



make great allowance for the incompetence of observers wholly 



ignorant of zoology. In the first place, we must dismiss from 



our minds the image of a shark as it appears when out of the 



* Wern. Trans, Edinburgh, vol. i. p. 444, 



