In quick succession there followed many other discoveries of plesiosaurs, not only in England but elsewhere in Europe. The famous English anatomist and paleontologist, Sir Richard Owen, to whom we owe, perhaps, more than to anyone else our present knowledge of these animals, the eccentric Hawkins of England, the learned von Meyer of Germany, and, in later times, more especially Seeley and Andrews of England, Fraas of Germany, Bogalobou and Riabanin of Russia, as well as many others, have brought to light during the past century many and varied forms of those sea-reptiles. Blaineville in 1835 gave to the plesiosaurs an ordinal rank under the class Ichthyosauria, and even the astute Owen in 1839 united them with the ichthyosaurs as a suborder of his Enaliosauria, or “sea-saurians.” He called them Sauropterygia, or “reptile-finned,” and these terms, Enaliosauria, Ichthyopterygia, and Sauropterygia, have long persisted in works on natural history because of the prestige of Owen’s name. As we shall see later, the plesiosaurs are really of remote kinship to the ichthyosaurs, and there is no such natural group as the Enaliosauria. It often takes years to distinguish between apparent and real relationships among living organisms, and both of these groups of sea-saurians have had a sorry experience in the treatment they have received from nomenclators. Perhaps because of the writings of Dean Buckland in his famous _Bridgewater Treatise_, in large part a theological disquisition, though of real scientific merit, the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs early became widely and popularly known, and, even to this day, these reptiles, together with the dinosaurs, first made known by Rev. Dr. Mantell, are often supposed to be the most typical and horrid of monsters. Many and fabulous are the tales that have been told of them in literature both grave and gay. The preacher adduced them as evidences of the great world-catastrophe told in biblical history, and the German student sings of them to the tune of the “Lorelei”: Es rauscht in Schachtelhalmen, verdächtig leuchtet das Meer; Da schwimmt mit Thränen in Auge ein Ichthyosaurus einher. Ihn jammert der Zeiten Verderbniss, denn ein sehr bedenklicher Ton War neuerlich eingerissen in der Liasformation. Der Plesiosaurus, der alte, der jubelt in Saus und Braus; Der Pterodactylus selber flog jungst betrunken nach Haus. Der Iguanodon, der Lümmel, wird frecher zu jeglicher Frist; Schon hat er am hellen Tage die Ichthosaura geküsst. We now know that they were not the monsters of horrid mien that they were once supposed to be: the largest plesiosaurs, were they living today, would find unopposable foes in the vicious and cruel crocodiles. They were relatively stupid and slow, cruel enough to the smaller creatures, but of limited prowess. But in structure and habits they are among the most remarkable of all the animals of the past or present.