The latter, fearing that the presence of this monster might destroy their fishery, and anxious to avenge their companion, made several weapons (harpoons?) of iron, and large hooks, and, putting to sea on the 6th of June in strong boats, discovered the great fish, and baited their lines with large pieces of horse-flesh, and ran a strong rope with a slip from the stem to the stern of a ship. Rushing furiously at the boat, the snake was caught into the slip-knot, and ultimately drawn on shore, when, on being measured, it was found to be "twenty Neapolitan palms long. His mouth was excessively wide, having three rows of teeth in the form of a saw in the upper jaw, and but one row in the under. He weighed sixteen _coutares_, or about four hundred-weight. In the stomach were found the skull of a man, two legs, part of the backbone and ribs." These were supposed to have been portions of the unfortunate fisherman, whom he had devoured some days before. By order of the Council of Health it was burned, lest it might infect the air. The writer adds, that Johnson (to whom we shall refer presently) mentions similar fish--one that weighed eight hundred-weight; another that weighed four thousand pounds, and in the stomach of which was found a man, in a complete suit of armour! It is a curious fact that recent scientific research has revealed the existence in the sea, at the greatest depths, of most minute and wonderfully formed organisms, the beauty and rarity of which necessarily secure our admiration; but instances of animals of enormous size being met with beyond those already known, are few and far between. This fact may be accounted for by the circumstance, that while it is easy to construct instruments for capturing the smaller creatures living in the deep, it is a very different matter to entrap and secure an unseen monster, whose very size must endow him with enormous strength. The whale, so far as we know, is the largest denizen of the deep. Whether it is possible that it can be equalled by giants of some other order or race, is the point which public curiosity is very keen to have settled. The appearance of great snakes at sea is recorded by more than one old voyager; but it would seem to have been only of late years that the idea of their existence has been generally confined to one, familiar to us all as the "Great sea-serpent." In _Opuscula Omnia Botanic Thomæ Johnsoni_, 1629, we have an account of a great serpent captured off Sandwich by two men, who found it stranded among the shoal water by the sea-shore. It is described as being fifty feet long, and of a fiery colour. We are also told that they conveyed the carcase home, and after _eating_ it, stuffed the skin with hay, to preserve it "as a perpetual remembrance of the fact."