4.96 CONCLUSIONS. 
afraid of it (7, 14, p.-184, 61, 64, 65, 67,92, 103mm 
139, 157), and will never forget to take with them asa foetida or 
castoreum, the smell of which the animal cannot bear (p. 130, p. 
134, p. 259) Moreover the fishermen advise to be very quiet when a 
sea-serpent approaches, and to avoid rowing, because the least noise 
attracts the animal (p. 259). Some believe that it casts its skin, 
as common snakes do (p. 132), and that it is born on land, and 
lives in forests and mountains till it can no longer hide its enor- 
mous body in it; then it seeks some river and floats down to the 
sea (p. 133). When swimming, sea-serpents don’t show their tail 
above the surface. Fishermen, in their fear, would say: if one was 
near the head, the other end of the animal could not be seen 
(103). I am convinced that this is one of the reasons that the ani- 
mal is sometimes said to be at least a cable in length. The animal 
leaves behind itself a considerable wake, which may be another 
reason that the witnesses exaggerated its length. So we find: it 
is three hundred feet long (p. 107, 21), about 320 feet (106 4), 
six hundred and seventy feet (p. 130, 61), about a fourth of an 
English mile (79), about 750 feet (85), from six hundred to 800 
ells, 1. e. from 1840 to 1780 feet (103), more than 500 feet (130) 
or half a mile long (156). 
The thickness too is sometimes exaggerated (twenty feet , p. 105); 
the head is described in some instances to be as large as a foering 
boat, i. e. about twenty feet long (117, 146), or twelve feet long 
(126), or perhaps ten feet long (118), and the tail fully a hundred 
and fifty feet in length (146). The jaws are said to be of such an 
enormous size that, if extended, they seemed sufficiently capacious 
ta admit of a tall man standing upright in them (118). It may 
be that the alleged serpentine shape of the animal caused some 
writers to give scales to the sea-serpent (p. 105), or that the dis- 
tance was too large for a closer examination, so that the observers 
thought it might have a hard skin (5), or a rough coating (41, 
51), or even a scaly one (39), or it was the fear which made them 
see scales (157) which in reality did not exist. Scales are also oc- 
casionally delineated (fig. 26) though the eye-witness does not men- 
tion them, and even believed it belonged to the eel-tribe (63). No 
wonder that such a terrible animal is often called Leviathan (p. — 
111), an animal which raises its coils so high above the water, 
that a ship can go through one of them (p. 109). Norwegian fish- 
ermen really believe that the animal sometimes comes on land as OLAus 
Maenus (p. 105) and Pontoppipan (p. 133) tell us, and as is stated 
