SNAKES AND SHARKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2814, 19 February 1908, Page 80

SNAKES AND SHARKS.

SOME STRIKING STORIES. The story of an Indian lady who went out of her mind through the shock >f finding id the morning, when she woke up to suckle ber baby, a cobra at her breast is paialleLed by the following; tale from tile Duke of Argyll's " Passages irom the Past." "Mr Druramond, ot th© British Legation at Washington," says the Duke, " tells me that when he •was at Buenos Aiies he heard >f many ca&es where not only cows, but women asleep, had been cucked by tnakes. The husbaxnl of 'one woman to!d him' he found a snak« sucking his wife's breast^ while the baby had hold of the snake's tail, and wae sucking that!" — The Duke's Sea Serpent. — The ridicule upon well-authent:-cated stories of sea serpents seems to me sillier than those stories themselves seem to the sceptics. Why should the survival' of such mammoth monsters in the ocean, where they have neither man nor any other formidable enemy to exterminate them, be incredible or improbable? Why, again, should euch an accurate and distinguished naturalist as Mr Joass be set down as either a fool 01 a knave when he tells what he had 6een unmistakably with his own eyes? "Mr Joass," writes the Duke of Argyll, "well known as an aceui'ate observer and distinguished naturalist, thus described what he him&elf saw one line morning when walking on the sands not far from Dunrobin Castle. He had not been thinking oi 2sor.se tale 6or sea dragons or ' Krakcns,' or, indeed, of anything but his work of teaching and of the beauty of tlie eea and shore, m hen suddenly, out of the same lovely water rolling so peacefully in long, gentle lines of waves to Ins feet, he saw, not far from the margin of the shore, a long head and sinuous body in apparent vertical undulations swimming along. He could not, he declared, be nrstaken. There was the break in the surface of the water, with the great head and the evidence of s? long eeipent's body making a trail and disappearing. Of course, no one but his fri € iv.i S believed him, although there was a iiitfy with him to bear witness to the accuracy of his description. But one word from Mr Joaes," testifies the Duke, "is worth many words from many ordinary mortals, and so we may confidently place his experience on a level with that of the captain »f the Daedalus, who, with his whole crew, saw a monster very much like that described at Dunrobin, but *arther south in warmer seas." — Another Scotch Monster. — One of the most authentic accounts of a eea monster is that of the Rev. Mr M'Clean, parish minister of Eig, one of the Western Islands, which he addressed to the secretary of the Wernerian- Society in 1809. " I saw the animal of which you inquire in June, 1808, on the coast of Coll. Rowing along that coast, I observed, at about the distance of half a mile, an object to windward which gradually excited astonishment. At first view it appeared like a, small rock ; but, knowing that there was no rock in that situation, I Sxed my eyes closely upon it, and saw it elevated considerably above the level of the sea, and distinctly perceived one of its eyes. Alarmed at the unusual appearance and size of the animal, I steered so as to be at no great distance from the shore. When nearly in a line between it and the shore, the monster, directing its head towards us, plunged violently under water. Certain that he was in chase of us, we plied hard to get to the shore. Just as we leapt out on a rock and had taken a station as high as we conveniently could, we saw it rapidly coming under water towards the 6tern of our boat. When within a few yards oi us, finding the water shallow, it raised its monstrous head above the water, and, by a winding course, got with apparent difficulty clear of the creek where our boat lay, and where the monster seemed in danger of being embayed. It continued to move off with its head above water and with the wind for about half a m'le, when we lost sight of it. Its head was somewhat broad, and of somewhat oval form ; its neck somewhat smaller ; its shoulders, if I can co term them, considerably broader ; and thence it ta.pered tow aids" the tail, which last it kept pretty low in the water so that a view could not be taken of it so distinctly as I wished. It had no fins that I could perceive, and seemed to me to move progressively by undulation up and down. Its length I believe to be Let ween 70ft and 80ft. The crew s of 13' fishing boats were so much terrified at its appearance that thej fled in a body from it to the .nearest creek for safety." —Was It a Shark?— In the same volume of the Wernerian Transactions there is an account of a monster which, in October of that year, 1808, was cast ashore dead on Stronsa. Such exaggerated and erroneous accounts or the monster reached Dr Barclay, the ablest anatomist of his day, -Jiat he was completely misled. Fortunately, however, some of the bones of its vertebral column were sent to Sir Everard Home, in London, and by these he was enabled to deteimine that the creature was a shark of the species Squalus Maximus, but of the monstrous length of 55ft. Here is an liiteieslmg fact about sharks which the Duke of Argyll learned from a naturalist. " Talking to a naturalist of sharks, 1 told him a story I had heard of a diver having entered the funnel of a sunken ship, and encountered a shaik from the other end. The diver, I said, was not frightened, knowing that the shark could not there turn on his 6ide to bite him.' 'Oh,' said the naturalist, 'they never take a man in mid-water, and therefore everybody who can dive can kill them. They can only feed off the ground or on the surface, and a diver may let them smell him at their pleasure.' " —Was It a Sea 1 ?— The monster certainly sec" by i'ie officers and men of H.-U.S Dfitd.iWiF to which the Duke refers, i-jukl iiot. h& he supposes, have belonged v* tfw> **uu<:

species as that seen by Mr M'Clean and the fishing fleet off the coast of Coll. Captain M'Quhae, of the Daedalus — which was on her wav frcm the Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena in the year 1848— could not, owing to the state of the wind, get nearer to the creatuie than 200 yards. Seen through glasses at this distance by himself ar.d all Irs officers, it seemed to belong rather to the lizard than to the serpent tribe. Its movement was steady, rapid, and uniform, as if propelled rather by fins than by undulating power. Its sfze was enormous, and naturalists inferred from the description given that it yrae a monstrous seal. — T.P.s Weekly.