It is hardly to be wondered at that two prominent scientists should have declared on behalf of the sea-serpent, for that remarkable creature has been reported at so many points, and by so many witnesses not addicted to fish tales nor liquor, that there ought to be some reason for him. He has been especially numerous off the New England coast. He was sighted off Cape Ann in 1817, and several times off Nahant. Though alarming in appearance--for he has a hundred feet of body, a shaggy head, and goggle eyes--he is of lamb-like disposition, and has never justified the attempts that have been made to kill or capture him. Rewards were at one time offered to the seafaring men who might catch him, and revenue cutters cruising about Massachusetts Bay were ordered to keep a lookout for him and have a gun double shotted for action. One fisherman emptied the contents of a ducking gun into the serpent's head, as he supposed, but the creature playfully wriggled a few fathoms of its tail and made off. John Josselyn, gentleman, reports that when he stirred about this neighborhood in 1638 an enormous reptile was seen "quoiled up on a rock at Cape Ann." He would have fired at him but for the earnest dissuasion of his Indian guide, who declared that ill luck would come of the attempt. The sea-serpent sometimes shows amphibious tendencies and occasionally leaves the sea for fresh water. Two of him were seen in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin, in 1892, by four men. They confess, however, that they were fishing at the time. The snakes had fins and were a matter of fifty feet long. When one of these reptiles found the other in his vicinage he raised his head six feet above water and fell upon him tooth and nail--if he had nails. In their struggles these unpleasant neighbors made such waves that the fishermen's boat was nearly upset. Even the humble Wabash has its terror, for at Huntington, Indiana, three truthful damsels of the town saw its waters churned by a tail that splashed from side to side, while far ahead was the prow of the animal--a leonine skull, with whiskers, and as large as the head of a boy of a dozen years. As if realizing what kind of a report was going to be made about him, the monster was overcome with bashfulness at the sight of the maidens and sank from view. In April, 1890, a water-snake was reported in one of the Twin Lakes, in the Berkshire Hills, but the eye-witnesses of his sports let him off with a length of twenty-five feet. Sysladobosis Lake, in Maine, has a snake with a head like a dog's, but it is hardly worth mentioning because it is only eight feet long-hardly longer than the name of the lake. More enterprise is shown across the border, for Skiff Lake, New Brunswick, has a similar snake thirty feet long. In Cotton Mather's time a double-headed snake was found at Newbury, Massachusetts,--it had a head at each end,--and before it was killed it showed its evil disposition by chasing and striking at the lad who first met it.