[The 17th. | THE VARIOUS EXPLANATIONS. 459 
theless, these circumstances do not prove to me that Captain Har- 
rington saw the sea-serpent, because that “queer fish’ so very 
nearly and completely took me in until I took him in.” 
“T am, Sir, your most obedient servant 
| “Pred. sonaith: « 
Mr. Gossz, in his Romance of Natural History, p. 320, in- 
quirmg whether the sea-serpent is an animal at all, treats of the 
sea-weed hypothesis. We will let him reason himself. 
“To which of the recognised classes of created beings can this 
huge rover of the ocean be referred? And, first, is it an animal 
at all? That there are immense algae in the ocean, presenting 
some of the characters described, has been already shown; and 
on two occasions an object supposed to be the “sea-serpent’’ proved 
on examination to be but a sea-weed floating; the separated and 
inverted roots of which, projecting in the role of the swell, seemed 
a head, and the fronds (in the one case), and (in the other) a 
number of attached barnacles, resembled a shaggy mane washed 
about in the water.” 
“But surely it must have been a very dim and indistinct view 
of the floating and ducking object, which could have mistaken 
this for a livmg animal; and it would be absurd in the highest 
degree to presume that of such a nature could be the creatures, 
going rapidly through the water at ten or twelve miles an hour, 
with the head and neck elevated, so distinctly seen by Captain 
M’Quhae and Mr. Davidson, the former at two hundred, the latter 
at thirty five yards’ distance. We may fairly dismiss the sea-weed 
hypothesis.” 
Again in Nature of the 12th. of September, 1872, appears the 
following passage which also clearly shows that by some unbelievers 
the sea-weed hypothesis is admitted. 
“The “dead season” has brought up its usual crop of reports of 
the reappearance of the sea-serpent, mostly easily resolvable into 
masses of floating sea-weed.” 
Mr. Anprew Whitson in his Lezsure Time Studies speaking of 
this hypothesis says: 
“That a long and connected string of sea-weed, extending for 
some fifty or sixty feet along the surface of a sea, slightly distur- 
bed by a rippling breeze, may be moved by the waves in a man- 
ner strongly suggestive of the movements of a snake in swimming, 
is a statement to the correctness of which I can bear personal tes- 
timony , and to the truth of which even observant sea-side visitors 
