In the year 1852 two statements were made, one by Captain Steele, 9th Lancers, the other by one of the officers of the ship _Barham_ (India merchantman), to the effect that an animal of a serpentine appearance had been seen about 500 yards from that ship (in longitude 40° E. and 37° 16´ S., that is, east of the south-eastern corner of Africa). “We saw him,” said the former, “about 16 or 20 feet out of the water, and he _spouted_ a long way from his head”—that is, I suppose, he spouted to some distance, not, as the words really imply, at a part of his neck far removed from the head. “Down his back he had a crest like a cock’s comb, and was going very slowly through the water, but left a wake of about 50 or 60 feet, as if dragging a long body after him. The captain put the ship off her course to run down to him, but as we approached him he went down. His colour was green with light spots. He was seen by every one on board.” The other witness gives a similar account, adding that the creature kept moving his head up and down, and was surrounded by hundreds of birds. “We at first thought it was a dead whale.... When we were within 100 yards he slowly sank into the depths of the sea; while we were at dinner he was seen again.” Mr. Alfred Newton, the well-known naturalist, guarantees his personal acquaintance with one of the recipients of the letters just quoted from. But such a guarantee is, of course, no sufficient guarantee of the authenticity of the narrative. Even if the narrative be accepted, the case seems a very doubtful one. The birds form a suspicious element in the story. Why should birds cluster around a living sea creature? It seems to me probable that the sea-weed theory, presently to be noticed, gives the best explanation of this case. Possibly some great aggregation of sea-weed was there, in which were entangled divers objects desirable to birds and to fishes. These last may have dragged the mass under water when the ship approached, being perhaps more or less entangled in it—and it floated up again afterwards. The spouting may have been simply the play of water over the part mistaken for the head.