| 1883. | REPORTS AND PAPERS. 371 
of great judgment, a profound thinker, and an able writer. At a 
time when, as he said, “the shafts of ridicule were launched against 
believers and unbelievers in the sea-serpent in a very pleasing and 
impartial manner’, he, in the true sperit of philosophical inquiry , 
in 1847, opened the columns of his magazine to correspondence 
on this topic, and all the more recent reports of marine monsters 
having been seen are therein recorded. To him, therefore, the ful- 
lest acknowledgements are due.” 
I too am under obligations to Mr. Newman, as to one who has 
collected so many reports of the sea-serpent and published them in 
his journal, but I fail to see in him what Mr. Ler asserts him to be. 
As to the contents of Mr. Lrn’s “Great Sea-Serpent”, the second 
part of his Sea-Monsters Unmasked, 1 may be allowed to note 
the following. 
First he mentions the various great snakes of antiquity and _ be- 
lieves them to be merely boas (read pythons) and real sea-snakes. 
Next he represents a figure, found on a sarcophagus or coffin in 
the Catacombs of Rome, and tells us that it corresponds in many 
respects with some of the descriptions of the sea-serpent given sev- 
eral centuries afterwards. I, however, don’t observe any resem- 
blance in them. I consider this monster as a singular combination 
of a horse and a fish, badly drawn, as one of the representations 
of those wonderful ideas or beliefs of antiquity concerning the 
existence of such monsters as sirens, tritons, the minotaurus, etc. 
Further he treats of OLtaus Magnus, Bishop Pontopprpan, Hans 
Eerpe, the Animal of Stronsa, and of various reports of the sea- 
serpent, and it is obviously a favoured idea of his that the sea- 
serpent is only to be accounted for by a great calamary; to prove 
this, he makes himself guilty of all kinds of misrepresentations 
and improbabilities; he considers every one as having been the 
dupe of optical deceptions, or as having made exaggerations, and 
their observations to be “full of error and mistakes”! And he who 
has never seen a sea-serpent, but sits pen in hand in his chair at 
his desk, knows it best of all: all sea-serpents were calamaries, 
except a very few, which were a row of porpoises! But the more 
Mr. Ler has to deal with more recent reports, the less he is able 
to explain the various sea-serpents by reference to his favoured 
calamary. Of the animals seen in the Harbour of Gloucester in 1817 
he says: “Of this I can offer no zoological explanation”. He neither 
gives an explanation of the sea-serpent seen in 1833 by British 
officers (n°. 97), nor of that in Lochourn (n°. 187, 138, 139, 140). 
