412 THE VARIOUS EXPLANATIONS. [The 10th. | 
in the existence of the sea-serpent has arisen from its bemg sup- 
posed to be the same animal as the kraken, or rather from the 
names having been used indiscriminately.” 
Another gentleman, who signed his article in the Zimes of No- 
vember 2nd., 1848, with the initials F. G. 8., came to the same 
suggestion. His letter will be found in its right place, after the 
statements of Captain M’Quuar (n°. 118). 
Dr. Cocswreti who perhaps feared that in spite of his “Plea” 
the story of the sea-serpent was on a fair way to be forgotten, 
once more took the subject m hand, and sent a second paper to 
the Zoologist of December 1848. This dissertation is at least better 
than the first, being partly critical, partly historical. Again, for 
history’s sake, I am obliged to repeat nearly his whole paper. 
“It grows more and more necessary every day to acknowledge 
the existence of a vast form of marine animal bearing some resem- 
blance to a serpent. The recent letter of Captam M’Quhae to the 
Admiralty allows of no other alternative than either to admit the 
evidence, or invent some still more extraordinary hypothesis to 
explain it away. ‘lhe forms of bearings of the strangers have been 
duly reported at head quarters, and no more deserve to be called 
in question, as regards the fidelity of the narrator, than the exis- 
tence of any commissioned “Snake” or “Anaconda’’, whose station 
and appointments we find recorded in the daily press. No preter- 
natural messenger in “the shape that tempted Eve”, — he passes 
by on the other side without manifesting the slightest degree of 
interest in human affairs; no phantom progeny of light and air, 
although affecting literally the same haunts as the “Flymg Dutch- 
man’, — he steers himself by compass, and is the herald of no 
signal disaster; no herd of porpoises disporting all in a row, and 
joined together by some Daedalian. process of imagination into the 
semblance of unity — his head is “decidedly that of a snake’, — 
he carries it for twenty minutes at a time out of the water; and 
his body is seen for a continuous length of sixty feet on a level 
with the surface. From the standard jest of the witty, and the 
discarded problem of the wise, he has shown himself likely to be 
“no joke” for his physical powers, and well deserving the gravest 
scientific inquiry.” 
“To show what a formidable and unyielding front has been 
heretofore opposed to him, I shall quote a passage from the article 
under the head of “Serpents” in the last edition of the “Kncyclo- 
pedia Britannica” (1842): “No proper proof has yet been adduced 
