r K E E A C E. 
Three years ago the Author of the following pages, having been 
called upon to read a paper before a Provincial Society, one of 
whose objects is the promotion of the study of Natural History, 
and fully aware of his slender pretensions to scientific knowledge, 
selected the subject of Apocryphal Sea Monsters, as one of the few 
on which his own experience, during twelve years spent at sea, 
might enable him to offer some little novelty to his hearers, and 
also because it appeared to him that this question had never yet 
been handled in a way calculated to elicit its true merits. 
S At some cost of time and labour, a variety of facts bearing on the 
subject were collected from such works on Natural History and 
Science as a limited access to good libraries, and small leisure, fur¬ 
nished opportunity. Nevertheless, the materials so collected were 
more numerous than could well be condensed within the pages of a 
paper whose purpose was only to engage the attention of a well- 
informed auditory for an hour—the best, therefore, being selected, 
the rest were laid aside. 
The short Essay produced under the foregoing circumstances, 
having performed the office for which it was intended, was cast aside 
and nearly forgotten, when the recent account of the creature seen 
by the captain and officers of the Daedalus, and the public interest 
expressed on the subject in many of the papers of the day, deter¬ 
mined the Author, on the persuasion of many of his friends, to lay 
before the world the fuller fruits of his former researches. 
He is aware that his publication can be viewed as little else than 
a collection of curious facts; though he has endeavoured to string 
them together in a way likely to assist the reader to arrive at some¬ 
thing like definite conclusions on this vexed question, or at least to 
dispel some of the mistiness with which it is surrounded. 
With this view, the Author has adverted as briefly as possible to, 
or neglected altogether, those accounts which carry improbability or 
STOSS mistake on the face of them : and he has wished alse tr» ho 
