few in which an ophidian proper--a true serpent--is indicated. There has seemed to be wanting an animal having a long snake-like neck, a small head and a slender body, and propelling itself by paddles.[32] [32] It must be noted, however, that in almost every case, except that of the _Osborne_, the paddles were _supposed_, not _seen_, and were invented to account for an animal of great length progressing at the surface of the water at the rate of twelve to fifteen miles an hour without its being possible to perceive, upon the closest and most attentive inspection, any undulatory movement to which its rapid advance could be ascribed. As the great calamaries were unknown, their mode of swift retrograde motion, by means of an outflowing current of water, was of course unsuspected. The similarity of such an animal to the _Plesiosaurus_ of old was remarkable. That curious compound reptile, which has been compared with "a snake threaded through the body of a turtle," is described by Dean Buckland, in his _Bridgewater Treatise_, as having "the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile, a neck of enormous length resembling the body of a serpent, the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a whale." In the number of its cervical vertebrae (about thirty-three) it surpasses that of the longest-necked bird, the swan. The form and probable movements of this ancient saurian agree so markedly with some of the accounts given of the "great sea-serpent," that Mr. Edward Newman advanced the opinion that the closest affinities of the latter would be found to be with the _Enaliosauria_, or marine lizards, whose fossil remains are so abundant in the oolite and the lias. This view has also been taken by other writers, and emphatically by Mr. Gosse. Neither he nor Mr. Newman insist that the "great unknown" must be the _Plesiosaurus_ itself. Mr. Gosse says, "I should not look for any species, scarcely even any genus, to be perpetuated from the oolitic period to the present. Admitting the actual continuation of the order _Enaliosauria_, it would be, I think, quite in conformity with general analogy to find some salient features of several extinct forms." [Illustration: FIG 24. _Plesiosaurus Dolichodeirus restored by The Rev. W. D. Canybeare._]