382 THE VARIOUS EXPLANATIONS. [The Ist. ] 
by very respectable persons to prove the existence of this enormous 
sea-animal, have imposed silence upon naturalists; I too should 
be silent, when the doubt which I always felt had not been turned 
into certainty by a little observation I made in the spring of 1826. 
Once when hunting on a stormy day along the coasts of the sea, 
I suddenly saw a sea-animal of great size swimming before the 
mouth of the Rhine-river. I was about to fire at this animal which 
I took for a shark, when I distinguished through the fog several 
others closely following each other. For the greater part hidden 
by the water, the upper part of this creature could be distinctly 
seen only for the short moment, when it was carried on the top 
of a wave, and plunged down into the precipice formed before it. 
The illusion caused by the continuous agitation of the waves indeed 
contributed to make doubtful the appearance of a great number of 
black objects, appearing together out of the water, disappearing 
the moment afterwards, and the whole of which deceitfully repre- 
sented the simultaneous movements of the undulations of one single 
body. Convinced that the animals were unable to swim in vertical 
undulations, I kept looking at this spectacle, till I knew this 
monstrous creature to be composed of a little troop of porpoises.” 
In the Archiv fiir Naturgeschichte, of 1841, Mr. Rataxr, who 
published in it seven accounts of sea-serpents, gathered by him on 
his journey in Norway, says: 
“If we submit the above mentioned evidences to an inquiry, we 
shall soon observe that they not only contain several contradictory 
statements, but that each of the evidences itself cannot even pretend 
to accuracy. Yet we may believe that what those persons took for 
a long animal, was really such a one. For I should not know, 
what else could be the cause of the illusion which has created the 
belief in such an animal. Truly, I know that some believe, that 
what has been taken for a so-called sea-serpent, to be nothing else 
but a row of porpoises, swimming in line. But all those persons, by 
whom the above-mentioned evidences are given were too familiar with 
the sea, and have too often observed porpoises together, 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’s holding its head above the surface, and 
about the size of it, must have been mere fiction, and this I 
cannot admit. According 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.” 
