426 THE VARIOUS EXPLANATIONS. [The 10th.] 
“In British Reptiles nothing remarkable has occurred; but I 
have been favoured with a communication, published in the Feb- 
ruary number (Zool. 2356), announcing the present existence of 
huge marine animals closely related to the Enaliosauri of by-gone 
ages, that appears to me in all respects the most interesting Nat- 
ural History-fact of the present century, completely overturning 
as it does some of the most favourite and fashionable hypotheses 
of geological science. The published opinion of Mr. Agassiz (Zool. 
2395) certainly favours the idea that Enaliosaurians may still exist: 
he says: 1t would be in precise conformity with analogy that an 
animal should exist in the American seas which has long been 
extinct and fossilized in the Eastern hemisphere: he instances the 
gar-pike of the western rivers, and says that, in a recent visit to 
Lake Superior, he has detected several fishes belonging to genera 
now extinct in Europe.” 
The communication mentioned here is that of Captain Horn, 
who saw the sea-serpent in the Gulf of Califormia (n°. 119). In 
fact, since this opinion was expressed by Acassiz, (where?) num- 
erous animals, even of tolerably large size, have been discovered 
in Australia as well as in the great depth of the ocean, the allies 
of which are only found in a fossilized state. 
The favourite Plesiosaurus hypothesis is also treated of and fin- 
ally adopted by Mr. Gossz, in his Romance of Natural History. 
After rejecting the hypotheses of the sea-serpent being only a 
deceitful huge stem of sea-weed, or a large seal, a cetacean, a 
basking shark, a large ribbon-fish, some large kind of the eel 
tribe, a large specimen of true sea-snakes, a strayed large land- 
snake as the boas, he goes on in the followmg manner: 
“It yet remains to consider the hypothesis advanced by Mr. E. 
Newman, Mr. Morries Stirling, and “F. G. S.”, that the so called 
sea-serpent will find its closest affinities with those extraordinary 
animals, the Hzahosauria, or Marine Lizards, whose fossil skeletons 
are found so abundantly scattered through the oolite and the lias. 
The figure of Plestosaurus, as restored in Professor Ansted’s An- 
cient World, has a cranium not less capacious or vaulted than that 
given in Captain M’Quhae’s figures; to which, indeed, but that 
the muzzle in the latter is more abbreviate, it bears a close re- 
semblance. The head was fixed at the extremity of a neck compos- 
ed of thirty to forty vertebrae, which, from its extraordinary 
length, slenderness, and flexibility, must have been the very coun- 
terpart of the body of a serpent. This snake-like neck merged 
