Captain Slocum, of the schooner Saladin, is said to have
seen a terrible sea serpent, on the voyage from Hayti to New York with a cargo of copper. It was a hundred feet long, tail 60 feet, body 40 feet. "The most curious feature about it," says the Pall Mall, "was an immense body of hard, gristly matter, 12 feet in height, 40 feet in width, with the same length, entirely void within, forming a large, bladder-shaped balloon, which filled with air , buoyed the serpent on the water." That, no doubt, is curious, but to us the most curious feature about the account of it is Captain Slocum's a priori knowledge of the creature. "Captain Slocum declares that the tail would weigh 1001b. to the cubic foot," "the bladder was two inches thick, but of a hard, dense, impene- trable character, and would resist knife or bullet." "Her touch is poison and her contact dangerous." Now Captain Sloe= "feared to fire at her or disturb her in any way," so how he knows so accurately that "the bladder would resist knife or bullet," that "her touch is poison," and so forth, is not clear. Can he gauge specific gravity, as well as poison, by the eye ? Or how did he appraise the weight per cubic inch? Could he also tell by inspection what the specific poison of her touch was ?
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