"a 
454, THE VARIOUS EXPLANATIONS. [The 16th. | 
the diameter of the neck by Captain M’Quuar at “sixteen inches” 
don’t agree at all! — In none of the reports of the animal of the 
Daedalus there is question of the “serpent” being “twenty feet 
projected from the water’; it is only stated that the head was 
kept four feet above the water. — Neither do the reports mention 
how much of the neck was exposed, besides the head: Mr. Gossz 
says “an equal length”. — Lieutenant Drummonp did zo? say that 
the mane was “perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head”: the 
gallant officer, on the contrary, did not mention the mane at all! — 
Prof. OwrEn relymg upon the descriptions of Captain M’QuHaE 
and drawings of one of the midshipmen, and admitting all their 
statements to be true and their sketches to be as accurate as pos- 
sible, absolutely rejects the estimation of the length of the animal 
at “sixty-feet at least’; m doing so he of course could not possibly 
come to another conclusion than that the animal was a mammal, 
and to the question: “which mammal could it have been? his 
reply could not be otherwise than: “a large seal’. It is evident 
that for this reason he recalled to his mind all the sea-mammals 
known to him, but he seems to have totally overlooked the pos- 
sibility of the existence of sea-mammals unknown to him!!! The 
conclusion: “the animal was a large seal” leads the Professor to 
write: “A larger body of evidences from eye-witnesses might be 
got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea-serpent’. The Pro- 
fessor would never have expressed such an opinion, if he had 
examined a// the reports about the animal, and a// that had been 
written about it up to his time. It is evident that, without a 
thorough investigation a sceptic must remain a sceptic. 
I need not say, why the sea-serpent cannot be a sea-elephant. 
The latter has a proboscis, the sea-serpent has none, the sea- 
elephant has no long neck, no long tail, no mane, whereas these 
characters are very prominent in the sea-serpent. 
The seventeenth explanation is the following: the sea-serpent is 
nothing else but a gigantic sea-weed, detached from the bottom 
of the sea. In 1849 we meet for the first time with this suggestion. 
In the Zoologist of that year, p. 2541, we read the following 
statement of Captain Herriman: 
“Mr. J. A. Herriman, commander of the ship Brazihan, now 
lying near the principal entrance of the London Dock, makes the 
following curious and interesting statement: -—— 
