Reptiles. 2315 



life the exigencies of the respiration of the great sea-serpent would always compel him 

 frequently to the surface ; and when dead and swollen — 



' Prone on the flood, extended long and large,' 

 He would 



* Lie floating many a rood ; in bulk as huge 

 As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 

 Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove.' 

 Such a spectacle, demonstrative of the species if it existed, has not hitherto met the 

 gaze of any of the countless voyagers who have traversed the seas in so many direc- 

 tions. Considering, too, the tides and currents of the ocean, it seems still more rea- 

 sonable to suppose that the dead sea-serpent would be occasionally cast on shore. 

 However, I do not ask for the entire carcase. The structure of the back bone of the 

 serpent tribe is so peculiar, that a single vertebra would suffice to determine the exist- 

 ence of the hypothetical Ophidian ; and this will not be deemed an unreasonable re- 

 quest when it is remembered that the vertebrae are more numerous in serpents than in 

 any other animals. Such large, blanched, and scattered bones on any sea-shore would 

 be likely to attract even common curiosity ; yet there is no vertebra of a serpent larger 

 than the ordinary pythons and boas in any museum in Europe. 



" Few sea coasts have been more sedulously searched, or by more acute natural- 

 ists (witness the labours of Sars and Loven) than those of Norway. Krakens and 

 sea-serpents ought to have been living and dying thereabouts from long before Pon- 

 toppidan's time, to our day, if all tales were true ; yet have they never vouchsafed a 

 single fragment of their skeleton to any Scandinavian collector ; whilst the other great 

 denizens of those seas have been by no means so chaiy. No museums, in fact, are so 

 rich in the skeletons, skulls, bones and teeth of the numerous kinds of whales, cacha- 

 lots, grampuses, walruses, sea unicorns, seals, &c, as those of Denmark, Norway and 

 Sweden ; but of any large marine nondescript or indeterminable monster they cannot 

 show a trace. 



" I have inquired repeatedly whether the natural-history collections of Boston, 

 Philadelphia, or other cities of the United States, might possess any unusually large 

 ophidian vertebra?, or any of such peculiar form as to indicate some large and unknown 

 marine animal ; but they have received no such specimens. 



" The frequency with which the sea-serpent has been supposed to have appeared 

 near the shores and harbours of the United States has led to its being specified as the 

 4 American sea-serpent;' yet out of the 200 vertebrae of every individual that should 

 have lived and died in the Atlantic since the creation of the species, not one has yet 

 been picked up on the shores of America. The diminutive snake, less than a yard in 

 length, * killed upon the sea-shore,' apparently beaten to death, ' by some labouring 

 people of Cape Ann,' United States (see the 8vo. pamphlet, 1817, Boston, page 38), 

 and figured in the ' Illustrated London News,' October 28, 1848, from the original 

 American memoir, by no means satisfies the conditions of the problem. Neither do 

 the Saccopharynx of Mitchell, nor the Ophiognathus of Harwood — the one 4£ feet, 

 the other 6 feet long ; both are surpassed by some of the congers of our own coasts, 

 and, like other muraenoid fishes and the known small sea-snakes {Hydrophis), swim by 

 undulatory movements of the body. 



" The fossil vertebrae and skull which were exhibited by Mr. Koch in New York 

 and Boston as those of the great sea-serpent, and which are now in Berlin, belonged 

 to different individuals of a species which I had previously proved to be an extinct 



