﻿xxii Proceedings. {December 13th, ipo^.. 



tail was about eighteen inches in diameter by the tail, and 

 thickened to two feet or more about 12 to 16 feet from the tail, 

 which was about the height it came up above the sea. I was 

 naturally immensely surprised and struck with what I saw, so 

 continued to watch, and a few seconds after the final disappear- 

 ance of the tail I saw a most distinct serpent's head come out of 

 the water about 50 yards from where the tail had disappeared ; 

 it came out with about 10 or 15 feet of body all of a uniform 

 thickness of about 3 to 4 feet, seemed to look round, and then 

 disappeared, and I never saw it again. Where I saw it was 

 shoal water of about three fathoms and on the edge of a dolerite 

 reef. It might have been a bottle-nosed whale, and I might 

 have been deceived by the sun being slightly in my eyes, but my 

 first impression at the time was, and still is, that it was a serpent- 

 like creature. Subsequently I heard that the serpent had about 

 two days previously been seen about 10 miles south of Timaru, 

 and the movements I saw corresponded with a description I had 

 read of a serpent being seen off the coast of the North Island of 

 N.Z. about a year previously. 



Dr. Hoyle afterwards suggested that what Mr, Tripp really 

 saw may have been a Cetacean. Most sea-serpent stories, he 

 said, on close investigation, resolved themselves into something 

 more familiar. Speaking generally, they could be classed under 

 several heads, such as a shoal of porpoises, a flight of birds, a 

 large squid, or other previously known object. 



Dr. C. H. Lees exhibited and described a series of micro- 

 photographs of steel wire in different stages of the drawing 

 process taken by the National Physical Laboratory from steel 

 wires used by Dr. J. R. Ash worth in his recent work on the 

 magnetic and other physical properties of drawn steels. The 

 longitudinal arrangement and extension of the particles becomes 

 very marked at a certain stage of the drawing process, and at 

 that point the capability of the steel of being magnetised also 

 increases considerably. 



Mr. Henry Siderottom read a paper, entitled, " The 

 Foraminifera from the Coast of the Island of Delos." 

 Pt. II. 



