great snake to be accepted as convincing evidence in its behalf. Thus Captain M’Quhae, of Her Majesty’s ship “Dædalus,” declared, in a report to the Admiralty thirty years ago, that he and his officers had seen sixty feet of a marine monster, with the head of a snake, under conditions which, taken with the trustworthiness and sobriety of his evidence, places the record of his encounter with “the great sea-serpent” above all others that either preceded or followed it. Yet even this account, so cautious in its language, and given by men so eminently capable of judging of objects seen at sea, was completely met at every point by the scientific verdict of “impossible.”
That sixty-foot monsters besides whales may exist Professor Owen does not deny, for have we not already seals of thirty feet and sharks of forty, besides congers of unknown lengths? But he says this: if sea-serpents have been in the seas from the first, and are still there in such numbers as reports would have us believe, how is it that no single fragment of one, fossilized or not, has ever yet been washed ashore or dug up? The negative evidence from the utter absence of any remains weighs, therefore, with the scientific mind, and ought also with public opinion, against even such positive evidence as that of the commander of the “Dædalus;” for, after all, just as positive evidence from just as trustworthy witnesses abounds for the proof of ghosts. So the grand old kraken, the great sea-worm, remains still without identity; and though I trust humanity will never abandon any of its “glorious old traditions,” especially such a fascinating one as the sea-serpent, I would caution it in the matter of any kraken professing to be more than a hundred yards long, lest it should be
