ible duel with his telescope and speaking as if he
were in a lecture room.

"How can that be?"

"Yes, it is so. The first of these hideous monsters has the snout of a
porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile; and it is this
that has deceived us. It is the most fearful of all antediluvian
reptiles, the world--renowned Ichthyosaurus or great fish lizard."

"And the other?"

"The other is a monstrous serpent, concealed under the hard vaulted
shell of the turtle, the terrible enemy of its fearful rival, the
Plesiosaurus, or sea crocodile."

Hans was quite right. The two monsters only, disturbed the surface of
the sea!

At last have mortal eyes gazed upon two reptiles of the great primitive
ocean! I see the flaming red eyes of the Ichthyosaurus, each as big, or
bigger than a man's head. Nature in its infinite wisdom had gifted this
wondrous marine animal with an optical apparatus of extreme power,
capable of resisting the pressure of the heavy layers of water which
rolled over him in the depths of the ocean where he usually fed. It has
by some authors truly been called the whale of the saurian race, for it
is as big and quick in its motions as our king of the seas. This one
measures not less than a hundred feet in length, and I can form some
idea of his girth when I see him lift his prodigious tail out of the
waters. His jaw is of awful size and strength, and according to the
best-informed naturalists, it does not contain less than a hundred and
eighty-two teeth.

The other was the mighty Plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical
trunk, with a short stumpy tail, with fins like a bank of oars in a
Roman galley.

Its whole body covered by a carapace or shell, and its neck, as flexible
as that of a swan, rose more than thirty feet above the waves, a tower
of animated flesh!

These animals attacked one another with inconceivable fury. Such a
combat was never seen before by mortal eyes, and to us who did see it,
it appeared more like the phantasmagoric creation of a dream than
anything else. They raised mountains of water, which dashed in spray
over the raft, already tossed to and fro by the waves. Twenty times we
seemed on the point of being upset and hurled headlong into the waves.
Hideous hisses appeared to shake the gloomy granite roof of that mighty
cavern--hisses which carried terror to our hearts. The awful combatants
held each other in a tight embrace. I could not make out one from the
other.