human mind in favour of the marvellous, we
can understand the excitement produced in the entire world by this
supernatural apparition. As to classing it in the list of fables, the
idea was out of the question.

On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the
Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass
five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at
first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even
prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water,
projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred
and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been
submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor
Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal,
unknown till then, which threw up from its blow-holes columns of water
mixed with air and vapour.

Similar facts were observed on the 23rd of July in the same year, in
the Pacific Ocean, by the Columbus, of the West India and Pacific Steam
Navigation Company. But this extraordinary creature could transport
itself from one place to another with surprising velocity; as, in an
interval of three days, the Governor Higginson and the Columbus had
observed it at two different points of the chart, separated by a
distance of more than seven hundred nautical leagues.

Fifteen days later, two thousand miles farther off, the Helvetia, of
the Compagnie-Nationale, and the Shannon, of the Royal Mail Steamship
Company, sailing to windward in that portion of the Atlantic lying
between the United States and Europe, respectively signalled the
monster to each other in 42 deg. 15' N. lat. and 60 deg. 35' W. long.
In these simultaneous observations they thought themselves justified in
estimating the minimum length of the mammal at more than three hundred
and fifty feet, as the Shannon and Helvetia were of smaller dimensions
than it, though they measured three hundred feet over all.

Now the largest whales, those which frequent those parts of the sea
round the Aleutian, Kulammak, and Umgullich islands, have never
exceeded the length of sixty yards, if they attain that.

In every place of great resort the monster was the fashion. They sang
of it in the cafes, ridiculed it in the papers, and represented it on
the stage. All kinds of stories were circulated regarding it. There
appeared in the papers caricatures of every gig