Home (afterwards Sir Everard), in which he recklessly sets aside the evidence of the persons who saw and…
- 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 107
- 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
Home (afterwards Sir Everard), in which he recklessly sets aside the evidence of the persons who saw and measured the animal in its most entire condition, as to its dimensions of length and thickness; and maintains that it was nothing but a Basking shark (Selache maximum!), which he supposes the love of the marvellous …
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 onlyHome (afterwards Sir Everard), in which he recklessly sets aside the evidence of the persons who saw and measured the animal in its most entire condition, as to its dimensions of length and thickness; and maintains that it was nothing but a Basking shark (Selache maximum!), which he supposes the love of the marvellous had magnified so enormously in the eyes of those whom he is pleased to call “_ignorant fishermen_”. Unfortunately for Home’s hypothesis, the Basking shark was probably far more familiar to those men than to himself; for it is often captured among the Orkney Islands; and its length and proportional thickness are so totally different from the animal in question, that the two could scarcely be confounded, by the most “ignorant fishermen” who had ever seen them.”
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.
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