"'From the tip of his nose to the end of his tail Is just nine thousand miles.' "We will dismiss everything of antiquity, and also the serpent of the foregoing ballad, and come down to modern times. Naturalists are now pretty well agreed that the existence of the sea-serpent is a possibility; the celebrated Professor Agassiz said that if a naturalist had to sketch the outlines of an ichthyosaurus or plesiosaurus from the remains we have of them, he would make a drawing very similar to the sea-serpent as it has been described. The race is generally believed to be extinct, but he thought it probable that it would be the good-fortune of some person on the coast of Norway or North America to find a living representative of this type of reptile. "Fossil remains of reptiles that lived ages and ages ago have been found by the geologists, and their former existence is proved beyond a doubt. For example, we find that on the coast of North America, there were reptiles that could swallow a full-sized man as easily as a frog swallows a fly. A restoration of the fossil reptiles that once flourished in the State of New Jersey would not make that State a pleasant one to reside in, and the same may be said of the plains of Kansas and other parts of America. Look at this picture of the reptiles of New Jersey, and then say if you would like them for neighbors. [Illustration: RESTORED FOSSIL REPTILES OF NEW JERSEY.] "If such things have lived, why is it impossible for some members of the family to be prowling around to-day in the depths of the ocean? If the size of the monsters causes us to be sceptical, let us remember that there are inhabitants of the deep that quite equal them in bulk. Whales that exceed eighty feet in length are not uncommon, and when we consider their great depth in proportion to their length, we can easily have enough to make a first-class sea-serpent, and leave a few tons to spare. [Illustration: CUTTLE-FISH ATTACKING A CHINESE JUNK.] "Then there is the colossal cuttle-fish which abounds in the Indian Ocean and adjacent waters; they have been found with arms twenty-eight feet long and two feet in diameter, and, as they have eight of these arms, the aggregate length of all of them would surpass any respectable sea-serpent. Fishing-boats and canoes are sometimes attacked by them, and it is said that they have been known to overturn a two-masted junk. In the year 1878 the steamer _Yang-tse_, of the French Mail Company, while coming down the China Sea, ran into one of these cuttle-fish during the night, and the shock of the blow was so great that it was felt throughout the ship.