THE GREA T SEA SERPENT. 
55 
is being swallowed feet foremost, or possibly being ejected 
head first, by an enormous sea monster, having the chest 
and fore-legs of a horse, a long arching neck, with a mane 
at its base, near the shoulders, a head like nothing in 
nature, but having hair upon and beneath the cheeks, the 
hinder portion of the body being that of a serpent of 
prodigious length, undulating in several vertical curves. 
This sculpture appears to have been cut between the 
beginning and the middle of the third century, about 
FIG. II. — JONAH AND THE SEA MONSTER. 
From ike Catacombs of Rome. 
A.D. 230, but it probably represents a tradition of far 
greater antiquity. 
We will now consider the accounts given by Scandinavian 
historians, of the sea-serpent having been seen in northern 
waters. Here, I suppose, I ought to indulge in the usual 
flippant sneer at Bishop Pontoppidan. I know that in ab- 
staining from doing so I am sadly out of the fashion; but I 
venture to think that the dead lion has been kicked at too 
often already, and undeservedly. Whether there be, or be not, 
a huge marine animal, not necessarily an ophidian, answering 
to some of the descriptions of the sea-serpent — so called — 
Pontoppidan did not invent the stories told of its appear- 
ance. Long before he was born the monster had been 
described and figured ; and for centuries previously the 
Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and Fins had believed in its 
