"About a year ago, while one of the steamers of the Peninsula and Oriental Company was making its voyage from Bombay to Aden, two or three passengers, who were on deck early in the morning, saw what exactly resembled a snake, sixty or eighty feet long, thrashing the water about half a mile from the ship. They called the attention of the captain to it, and then that of the officer on watch; the captain turned for a few seconds in the direction indicated, and then looked away, and, as he did so, he instructed the officer of the watch to keep his eyes straight ahead. The passengers afterward drew up a statement of what they had seen, and asked the captain to sign it; he refused to do so, and furthermore ordered his officers and men to make no mention of the affair in any way whatever. He gave as an excuse for his action that, no matter how seriously and carefully he made his statement, he would be ridiculed for it, and his veracity and sobriety questioned, and he did not care to be thus treated. 'If a snake should come on board,' said he, 'and eat up half the crew and passengers, I wouldn't say it was a snake, unless I could take him along to prove it, and perhaps then I wouldn't.'
"The sea-serpent described in ancient histories is undoubtedly fictitious, and so is the one referred to in the nautical song, somewhat like this,
"'From the tip of his nose to the end of his tail
Is just nine thousand miles.'
"We will dismiss everything of antiquity, and also the serpent of the foregoing ballad, and come down to modern times. Naturalists are now pretty well agreed that the existence of the sea-serpent is a possibility; the celebrated Professor Agassiz said that if a naturalist had to sketch the outlines of an ichthyosaurus or plesiosaurus from the remains we have of them, he would make a drawing very similar to the sea-serpent as it has been described. The race is generally believed to be extinct, but he thought it probable that it would be the good-fortune of some person on the coast of Norway or North America to find a living representative of this type of reptile.
"Fossil remains of reptiles that lived ages and ages ago have been found by the geologists, and their former existence is proved beyond a doubt. For example, we find that on the coast of North America,there were reptiles that could swallow a full-sized man as easily as a frog swallows a fly. A restoration of the fossil reptiles that once flourished in the State of New Jersey would not make that State a pleasant one to reside in, and the same may be said of the plains of Kansas and other parts of America. Look at this picture of the reptiles of New Jersey, and then say if you would like them for neighbors.
RESTORED FOSSIL REPTILES OF NEW JERSEY.
"If such things have lived, why is it impossible for some members of the family to be prowling around to-day in the depths of the ocean? If the size of the monsters causes us to be sceptical, let us remember that there are inhabitants of the deep that quite equal them in bulk. Whales that exceed eighty feet in length are not uncommon, and when we consider their great depth in proportion to their length, we can easily have enough to make a first-class sea-serpent, and leave a few tons to spare.