Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1877 — The Sea-Serpent and the Savants. [ARTICLE]

The Sea-Serpent and the Savants.

If any one is still subject to the recurrent alarm that the men of science are beginning to assume an authority similar to that they have overthrown and to be the Popes of the future (with power to explode the world chemically if they are not obeyed), he will do well to observe the deference with which the formidable savants have gradually yielded to the accumulated testimonies ot" sailors with regard to the sea-serpent, although the existence of such monsters was quite unprovided for in their zoological theories. I remember, more than twenty years ago, when Prof. Agassiz was taking his class *on a scientific excursion .along the Coast of Nahant, he paused on a rock, and in his own graphic way gave a summary of the narratives of the sea-serpent said to have been seen near there. One of our class indulged in some ridicule of the monster, but Agassiz checked him, and said that it was a matter which must not be dismissed without further investigation. The important mass of testimony which has accumulated on the subject has been carefully reviewed in the March number of that excellent old periodical, the Gentlemen'» Magazine, by Prof. Richard A. Proctor, in a paper, entitled “ Strange Sea Creatures.” After sifting the evidence cautiously, Prof. Proctor arrives at the conclusion that at least one large marine animal exists which has not as yet been classified among the known species of the present era; that this animal has a serpentine neck, and a head small as compared with its body; that it is an air-breather, probably warm-blood-ed, and certainly carnivorous; that its pro{telsive power being great, and apparently ndependent of its undulations, it presumably has concealed paddles. Those circumstances correspond with the belief that it is the enalioxaurian, or modern representative of thelong-necked pleeioeaurue of the Mesozaic era, a member of that strange family whose figure resembles a serpent drawn through the body of a sea-turtle. That it is so much larger than any fossil remains of the same family which have been found, may be accounted for by the fact that if one or two of them should survive at all, it naturally would be through their gigantic size and strength. Mr. Proctor thinks the of huge cuttle-fish exaggerated, but believes In the gigantie tad-pole—2oo feet in lengthseen in the Malacca Straits by officers of the Nestor, and at first mistaken for a shoal. Dr. Andrew Wilson, who captured the ribbon-fish, sixty feet long, also believes that there is some sea-monster which mariners occasionally see. Prof. Gosse holds the same view. Prof. Owen, thirty years ago, suggested that the monster might be the sea elephant (Phocaprobotcidea), which is sometimes thirty feet long; but he has had nothing to say of the evidences and descriptions adduced since then, and the notable silence of the zoologists generally must be regarded as their consent to the main fact—that gigantic monsters exist, though as yet “ unknowable.”—if. D. Conway, in Cincinnati Commercial. There has been trouble in the San Francisco mint at the discovery that the double eagles made from the new dies are thicker than the old ones, though of the same weight, twenty of the new coins being 1 68-64 inches high, or 8-64 more than the others. The merchants complained of the inequality, and, after $820,000 had been issued, the coinage was stopped. The same difference was found at the Philadelphia mint, but it is now ascertained that the zew thickness is the correct one, and the coinage has been resumed.