The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-05-07
HUNTING OCEAN VAMPIRES.
MoNST ER soIETIMES REFERS-
 ES THE ROLE
And Becomes the Hunter-Appearanee
 and Habits.

With the possible exception of the basking shark. the Sea Devir' or "Oeean Vampire" is the largest of all the monsters of the deep. It is at all times a dangerous undertaking to at
 temptito capture one of these monsters, but particularly so in the case of a mother accompanied by her offspring. She is quite capable of reversing the role of hunter and hunted, attacking and capsizing the boat containing her
 would-be captors, and of seeing that
 none of them escapes alive.
 Imagine writes the Hon. William
 Elliot. in describing the exciting sport
 he had in hunting ocean vampires, "a monster from sixteen to twenty feet across the back, full three feet in depth, [ possessed of powerful yet flexible flaps
 or wings with which he drives himself furiously in the water or vaults high in
 the air, through which he skins like some enormous bird: his feelers (com-
 monly called horns) projecting several feet beyond his mouth, and padding all the small fry that constitute his food into that capacious reeeptacle-and you
 will have an idea, though an imperfect
 one, of this extraordinary fish,
 The so-caled horns" to which allu-
 sion is made are a singular feature in
 this anmal. The pectoral or breast fins, much elongated, ponted, arched in front,
 concave behind, stop short at the head,
 to reappear as frontal appendages pro-
 jected on each side of the head. These lappendages take the form and charac- ter of limbs, being flexible and capable
 of grasping prey and carrying it to the
 mouth. The 'feelers," as they are
 called, are sometimes three feet or more in length, and are curiously articulated at the ends so as to resemble the fin- gers of the human hand when clenched. In this way fishing boats and vessels \ of much larger size have been dragged from their moorings and in some cases capsized by the ocean vampires having laid hold of the anchor. An instance of this kind occurred in the harbor of Charleston. A schooner lying at an
 chor, suddenly and seemingly of it's own volition, to the amazement and alarm
 of those on board, started at a furious rate across the harbor Upon nearing
 the opposite shore its course changed so
 abruptly as almost to captize the ves- lsel, and it recrossed the harbor to it's
 former moorings.
 These mysterious flights across the
 harbor were repeated a number of times | in the presence of hundreds of aston ished spectators, who were utterly at a loss to account for the phenomenon. The migrations ceased as suddenly as hey began. Not till then did the back land undulating flukehs of an immense ocean vampire, appearing above the water of the harbor, disclose the mo- tive power that caused it all
 One of the curious habits of the fish i is to throw somersaults, sometimes at a considerable distance beneath the sur lface and sometimes in the air above the surface The reason for this peculiar practice, which is kept up for hours, has, so far as the writer knows, never ibeen conjectured At times the great fish will throw himself bodily perhaps as much as ten or twelve feet into the Iair.-Sunday Magazine.