As for the absence of remains, Mr. Darwin has pointed out that the fossils we possess are but fragments accidentally preserved by favouring circumstances in an almost total wreck. We have many instances of existent creatures, even such as would have a far better chance of floating after death, and so getting stranded where their bones might be found, which have left no trace of their existence. A whale possessing two dorsal fins was said to have been seen by Smaltz, a Sicilian naturalist; but the statement was rejected, until a shoal of these whales were seen by two eminent French zoologists, MM. Quoy and Gaimard. No carcase, skeleton, or bone of this whale has ever been discovered. For seventeen hours a ship, in which Mr. Gosse was travelling to Jamaica, was surrounded by a species of whale never before noticed—30 feet long, black above and white beneath, with swimming paws white on the upper surface. Here, he says, was “a whale of large size, occurring in great numbers in the North Atlantic, which on no other occasion has fallen under scientific observation. The toothless whale of Havre, a species actually inhabiting the British Channel, is only known from a single specimen accidentally stranded on the French coast; and another whale, also British, is known only from a single specimen cast ashore on the Elgin roast, and there seen and described by the naturalist Sowerby. Dr. Andrew Wilson, in an interesting paper, in which he maintains that sea-serpent tales are not to be treated with derision, but are worthy of serious consideration, “supported as they are by zoological science, and in the actual details of the case by evidence as trustworthy in many cases as that received in our courts of law,” expresses the opinion that plesiosauri and ichthyosauri have been unnecessarily disinterred to do duty for the sea-serpents. But he offers as an alternative only the ribbon-fish; and though some of these may attain enormous dimensions, yet we have seen that some of the accounts of the supposed sea-serpent, and especially the latest narrative by the captain and crew of the _Pauline_, cannot possibly be explained by any creature so flat and relatively so feeble as the ribbon-fish. On the whole, it appears to me that a very strong case has been made out for the enaliosaurian, or serpent-turtle, theory of the so-called sea-serpent.