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have been found buried in the bodies of whales, which the unicorn
always attacks with success. Others have been drawn out,
not without trouble, from the bottoms of ships, which they
had pierced through and through, as a gimlet pierces a barrel.
The Museum of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris possesses one
of these defensive weapons, two yards and a quarter in length,
and fifteen inches in diameter at the base.
"Very well! suppose this weapon to be six times stronger and the animal
ten times more powerful; launch it at the rate of twenty miles an hour,
and you obtain a shock capable of producing the catastrophe required.
Until further information, therefore, I shall maintain it to be
a sea-unicorn of colossal dimensions, armed not with a halberd,
but with a real spur, as the armoured frigates, or the `rams' of war,
whose massiveness and motive power it would possess at the same time.
Thus may this puzzling phenomenon be explained, unless there be something over
and above all that one has ever conjectured, seen, perceived, or experienced;
which is just within the bounds of possibility."
These last words were cowardly on my part; but, up to a certain point,
I wished to shelter my dignity as professor, and not give
too much cause for laughter to the Americans, who laugh well
when they do laugh. I reserved for myself a way of escape.
In effect, however, I admitted the existence of the "monster."
My article was warmly discussed, which procured it a high reputation.
It rallied round it a certain number of partisans. The solution
it proposed gave, at least, full liberty to the imagination.
The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.
And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium
through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals,
such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced
or developed.
The industrial and commercial papers treated the question chiefly from this
point of view. The Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, the Lloyd's List,
the Packet-Boat, and the Maritime and Colonial Review, all papers devoted
to insurance companies which threatened to raise their rates of premium,
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