42 
SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED. 
foundland, and a portion of one and the whole of the other, 
were brought ashore, and preserved for examination by 
competent zoologists. 
The circumstances under which the first was seen, as 
sensationally described by the Rev. M. Harvey, Presby- 
terian minister of St. John's, Newfoundland, in a letter to 
Principal Dawson, of McGill College, were, briefly and 
soberly, as follows : — Two fishermen were out in a small 
punt on the 26th of October, 1873, near the eastern end of 
Belle Isle, Conception Bay, about nine miles from St. John's. 
Observing some object floating on the water at a short 
distance, they rowed towards it, supposing it to be the debris 
of a wreck. On reaching it one of them struck it with his 
" gafl"," when immediately it showed signs of life, and shot 
out its two tentacular arms, as if to seize its antagonists. 
The other man, named Theophilus Picot, though naturally 
alarmed, severed both arms with an axe as they lay on the 
gunwale of the boat, whereupon the animal moved off, and 
ejected a quantity of inky fluid which darkened the sur- 
rounding water for a considerable distance. The men went 
home, and, as fishermen will, magnified their lost " fish." 
They " estimated " the body to have been 60 feet in length, 
and 10 feet across the tail fin ; and declared that when 
the ''fish" attacked them "it reared a parrot-like beak 
which was as big as a six-gallon keg." 
All this, in the excitement of the moment, Mr. Harvey 
appears to have been willing to believe, and related without 
the expression of a doubt. Fortunately, he was able to 
obtain from the fishermen a portion of one of the tentacular 
arms which they had chopped off with the axe, and by so 
doing rendered good service to science. This fragment 
(Fig. 9), as measured by Mr. Alexander Murray, provincial 
geologist of Newfoundland, and Professor Verrill, of Yale 
