[ N°. 118.} REPORTS AND PAPERS. 283 
“As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 
“Titanian, or Harth-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 directions. Considering, too , 
the tides and currents of the ocean, it seems still more reasonable 
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 existence of the hypothetical 
Ophidian; and this will not be deemed an unreasonable request, 
when it is remembered that the vertebrae are more numerous in 
serpents than in any other animals. Such large blanched and scat- 
tered bones on any sea-shore, would be likely to attract even com- 
mon curiosity; yet there is no vertebra of a serpent larger than 
the ordinary pythons and boas in any museum in Hurope.” 
“Hew sea-coasts have been more sedulously searched, or by more 
acute naturalists (witness the labours of Sars and Lovén), than 
those of Norway. Krakens and sea serpents ought to have been 
living and dying thereabouts from long before Pontoppidan’s time 
to our day, if all tales were true; yet they have never vouchsafed 
a single fragment of the skeleton to any Scandinavian collector ; 
whilst the great denizens of those seas have been by no means so 
chary. No museums, in fact, are so rich in skeletons, skulls, bones 
and teeth of the numerous kind of whales, cachelots, grampuses , 
walrusses, sea unicorns, seals, etc., as those of Denmark, Norway, 
and Sweden; but of any large marine nondescript or indeterminable 
monster they cannot show a trace.” 
“IT have inquired repeatedly whether the natural history collec- 
tions of Boston, Philadelphia, or other cities of the United States, 
might possess any unusually large ophidian vertebrae 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 Jed to its being specified as the “American sea-serpent;” yet, 
out of the two hundred vertebrae of every individual that should 
have lived and died in the Atlantic since the creation of the spe- 
cies, 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 labourmg 
