260 THE VARIOUS ACCOUNTS, [1841.] 
those persons who bear the evidences, took for a long animal, was 
really such a one. For I should not know, what could be the 
cause of the illusion, which had created the belief in such an ani- 
mal. Some persons, as | know, believe that what has been taken 
for a so-called sea-serpent, was nothing else but a row of porpoises, 
swimming in a line. But all those persons by whom the above 
mentioned evidences are borne were too familiar with the sea, and 
had observed porpoises together too often to be deceived by a row 
of such animals swimming on the surface of the water. If this, 
however, had been the case, all the observations related to me of 
the sea-serpent holding its head above the surface, and about its 
size, must have been mere fictions, and this I cannot believe. Ac- 
cording to all this, it evidently cannot be doubted that there is 
a long serpentine animal in the sea of Norway, which may grow 
to a considerable length.” 
Now Mr. Rarsake weighs and considers to what kind of animals 
the sea-serpent may belong. This, however, we omit here, as we 
have partly discussed these views in our Chapter on Would-be 
Sea-Serpents, where we spoke of the Animal of Stronsa, and as 
we shall once more refer to it m our Chapter of Explanations. 
Every one, I think, will agree with me, that Mr. Rarnksn has 
committed two faults. 1. He criticises the correctness of the state- 
ments in question, apparently without having taken the trouble 
to read all that had been written about the subject. If he had 
done so, he would never have said that the particulars of the 
evidences collected by him in Norway were sometimes contradict- 
ory; on the contrary, he would have observed that they completed 
one another! 2. He was the first scientific man and zoologist who 
had an opportunity to see the sea-serpent, propably even to kill 
it, and yet he returns to Germany without having made one single 
effort either to kill or to see it! 
Immediately after Mr. Hetnrica Ratakn’s dissertation , the Editor 
of the Archiv fiir Naturgeschichte, the well-known Prof. Dr. W. 
I’. Ericuson, wrote a paper, in which he gave full details of the 
Animal of Stronsa and descriptions of the saved bones. He ends 
this extract with the words: 
“Consequently the Animal of Stronsa has no relation at all with 
the sea-serpent of the Norwegians; the animal, however, seen by 
