stood up from its middle to rest its chin on the topgallant-stunsail-boom of a three-masted ship; that spouted and roared at one end and lashed up the sea into little bubbles at the other; that reared horned heads out of water, glaring the while with eyes of flame upon the trembling mariners, shaking aloft a more than leonine mane of hair, and paddling in the air with great uplifted paws, — parents, I think did well to warn off so disreputable an apparition from the sacred ground of infant schools and nurseries, and the scientific world showed judgment in withdrawing its approbation from such a disorganizing beast.
Nature insists upon her proprieties being observed, and so long as man remembers this, his zoological beliefs will remain fit to lie upon every breakfast table.
But if once we fall from the strict paths of possibility, our facts become improbable, and there will be an inrush of creatures trampling across, flying over, and swimming through every rule of natural history, every law of creation. If once the key is turned to let in these disturbing dualities, a mob of indeterminate things — gryphons and sphinxes, basilisks and dragons, wolf-men and vampires, unicorns and cockatrices — will crowd into the orderly courts of knowledge, and, breaking down all the bulwarks of our rational beliefs, will seat themselves triumphantly among the ruins of science!
No such dismal prospect of scientific chaos need, however, be entertained from the latest appearance of the sea-serpent, an animal which, from its description, would seem one that may be confidently admitted into the best conducted families as an article of household faith. Captain Cox, master of the British ship “Privateer,” states that a hundred miles west of Brest, at five o’clock
