“Sir,--Will you allow me to correct a statement that appeared in the last Number of your interesting…
- Date of account
- Late nineteenth-century survey
- Source
- The great sea-serpent: an historical and critical treatise
- Reference
- The great sea-serpent: an historical and critical treatise · selected passage 61
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English edition of a European scholarly compilation
- Translation
- English edition of A. C. Oudemans's historical survey
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
“Sir,--Will you allow me to correct a statement that appeared in the last Number of your interesting publication?
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention only“Sir,--Will you allow me to correct a statement that appeared in the last Number of your interesting publication? The fossil mentioned at the conclusion of the admirable notice of the so-called Sea-Serpent, as having been exhibited in America under the name of _Hydrarchos Sillimannii_, was constructed by the exhibitor Koch, from bones collected in various parts of Alabama, and which belonged to several individual skeletons of an extinct marine cetacean, termed _Basilosaurus_ by the American naturalists, and better known in this country by that of _Zeuglodon_, a term signifying _yoked teeth_. Mr. Koch is the person who, a few years ago, had a fine collection of fossil bones of elephants and mastodons, out of which he made up an enormous skeleton, and exhibited it in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, under the name of _Missourium_.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis is a historical compilation of unusual-animal reports and argument. Witness testimony, repetition between publications and the author's zoological assumptions all affect independence and reliability.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares morphology, behaviour and setting while keeping misidentification, folklore, exaggeration, error and known animals available as alternatives.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.