WOULD-BE SEA-SERPENTS. 87 
with Mr. Evzrarp Home's opinion in all particulars, except in 
the so-called exaggerated dimensions. I firmly believe that the car- 
cass of the animal measured fifty-five feet from the head to the 
end of the tail, and as a piece of tail seems to have been broken 
off, the vertebral column may even have been one of sixty feet. 
The dried and shrivelled skull measured twelve mches “from the 
first cervical vertebra to the farthest part that remains of the jaw’. 
But as I have pointed out that this “first cervical vertebra” was in 
reality the cartilaginous nose tip with its two contorted cartilagi- 
nous appendages, and as this nose tip must have measured (see 
the drawing of the skull in the Memoirs of the Wernerian Society, 
Vol. I) two inches, the whole skull measured fourteen inches. But 
the skull was dried and shrivelled, consequently we may safely 
admit that it measured in its perfect state about twenty inches. 
Consequently I conclude that: the largest Basking-shark that ever 
stranded on the coasts of Great Britam measured upwards of sixty 
feet, viz. the so-called “Animal of Stronsa”. The putrified body of 
it was floated ashore, and the putrification had continued so far 
that the almost black covering of the two backfins and the tail-fin 
were not only washed away by the waves, but that their yellow 
fibres had become loose. The eye-witnesses evidently reasoned that 
these fibres must have been present all along the back between 
these three parts, now far remote one from another, but were 
washed away, and they therefore concluded that the animal had 
“a mane, extending from the shoulders’ (the part of the back at 
the level of the pectoral fins) “to the tail”, i.e. to the end of the 
tail. Or, according to another witness it extended “to within two 
feet and a half of the tail’; which may be explained in two ways, 
viz., either he meant that the mane extended to within two feet 
and a half beyond the level of the last pair of paws (the claspers) , 
consequently the level where the tail begins, and here is the exact 
place of the hindmost back-fin, or he meant that the mane did 
not quite extend to the point of the tail, from which we in our 
turn may conclude that the last two feet and a half of the tail had 
already been wholly cleared from the fibres of the putrified tail-fin. 
Moreover putrification on one side, and the beating of the waves 
on the other side, had already removed the animal’s enormous 
jaws, gills, with adherent muscles and cartilages, and all the 
entrails, except the valvular intestine. On persons who never saw 
such a mutilated specimen of a shark, the animal must have made 
the impression of being a sea-snake ! 
