Capture of the Great American Water-Snake
Anon
Genre: | News-Commentary, Drollery; Reportage, Spoof |
Subjects: | Monstrosities, Hunting, Zoology, Natural History, Comparative Philology, Charlatanry, Superstition |
Discusses reports of the capture of the 'Great American Water-Snake' in a lake near New York and analyses the snake's characteristics. Relates that the snake's power of 'heavy, short puffs' gives it the ability to write its own advertisements from Barnum's American Museum. Reports that one eminent 'naturalist of the day' has pronounced the beast to be 'a huge specimen of monstrous sea calf, resulting from a cock-and-a-bull and a nightmare'. |
© Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Project, Universities of Leeds and Sheffield, 2005 - 2020
Printed from Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: An Electronic Index, v. 4.0, The Digital Humanities Institute <http://www.sciper.org> [accessed ]