The Osceola times., 1877-02-10
THE GREAT UNKNOWN.
Professor Proctor on tho Supposed Ex-
,steuce of Sea Monsters,


In a communication to the London
Echo, professor Richard A. Proctor
says:
1.-The sea-serpent has long been re-
garded by most persons as simply a
gigantic fraud. Either the object
which appe red like a sea-serpent was
sometimes altogether diiIerent--a float
ing tree entangled in seawced, the ser
pcntine outline of distant hills halt Lost
under scudding haze, a row Of leap
ing porpoises, or, if a single living
creature at all, then one of known
species seen under unusual and decep-
tive conditions--or else the circum-
stanital accounts which could not be
thus explained away were concoctions
of falsehood.
"Yet, as the naturalist Gosse long
since pointed out, on his curious essay
or The Great Unknown it is alto
gether unlikely that men know all the
forms of animals which exist in the
ocean, and the antecedent probability
against the theory Of the existence of
creatures such as the great sea-serpent
has been described to be is not suff-
cient to outweigh the evidence which
has been given respecting such crea-
lures. No one who has read the
account given by the officers of the
Daialous, for instance, can for mo-
ment suppose that they were deceived
in any Of the ways ingeniously i'm
agined; we must assume that they all
told untruths before we can reject the
belief that some ss yet unknown sen
creature was seen by them. The
creature may quite possibly not have
been serpent properly SO called, the
picture drawn by one Of the midship.
men may have been incorrect in de-
tails (as professor Owen insisted il
must have bcen); but, unless the whole
affair was fraud, a sea animal was
seen which had all the appearance of a
gigantic serpent.
"And the idea of fraud in such
matters is not nearly SO reasonable as
many seem to imagine. Travellers are
sometimes said TO tell marvellous stories;
but it is noteworthy fact that in nine
cases out of ten, the marvellous stories
of travellers have been confirmed.
Man ridiculed the tale, brought back
by those who had sailed far to the
south, that the sun there moves rom
lett to right, MS you face his midday
place; but We know that those travellers
told the truth. The first account Of
the giraffe was laughed to scorn, and
it was satisfactorily proven that ne
such creature could possibly exist
The gorilla would have been jeered
out OF existence but for the fortunate
arrival of a skeleton of his at an early
stage of our acquaintance with that
prepsssessing cousin of ours.
Monstrous cuttlefish were though,
to he monstrous lies, till the Alecton
in 1861, came upon one and captured
its tail, whose weight of forty pounds
led naturalists to estimate the entir,
weight Of the creature at four thou
sand pounds, or nearly couple of tons
In 1873, again. two fishermen encoun
tered gigantic cutie in Conception
bay, Newfoundland, whose arms wer,
about thirty-fve in length (the fisher
men cut off from one arm a piece
twenty-five feet long, while its bo,y wa,
estimated at sixty feet in length and
five feet in diameter--so that the devi
fish of Victor Hugo's famous story wa,
a mere baby cutie 10 comparison with
the Newfoundland monster. The mcr
maid, again, has been satislactoril,
identified with the manatec, or 'wo
man fish, as the Portuguese call il
which assumes, says Captain Scoresby
such positions that the human appear
ance is very closely initiated
" AS for stories of sea-serpents, ,natu
ralists have been far less disposed to b,
incredulous than the general public
DIR. Andrew Wilson, for instance, af
ter spanking of the recorded observa
tions in much such terms as | hav,
used above, says: I'VE may thel
affirm safely that there Me many veri
fed pieces of evidence on record o
strange marine forms having been me
with, which evidences, judged accord
ing to ordinary and common sens,
1sass, ge 20 prove that certain hithert,
undescribed marine organisms ito Ger
tainly exist in the sea depths. As t,
the support which natural history cal
give to the above proposition, 'zoolo
gists can but admit he proceeds, 'th,
correctness of the observation. Certain
organisms, and especially those of ma
rine (e. 9. certain whales), are known
to be Of exceedingly rare occurrence
Our knowledge of marine reptilla i
confesedly very small and, best o
all, there Is no counter objection o
feasible argument which the natllralis
can offer by way of denying the abov,
proposition. He would be forced +
admit the existence of purely marin
genera Of snakes which possess com
pressed tails, adapted for swimming
and other points of organization ad
mittedly suited to a purely aquaii
existence.
at, therefore, we admit the posi-
I,l.ty-.av tbo o~o.xo,.l.l. l.1 a: I.