About the book
In the summer of 1883 the International Fisheries Exhibition filled the South Kensington grounds, and Henry Lee — sometime naturalist of the Brighton Aquarium, a man who had spent years watching octopus and cuttle through glass — wrote two shilling handbooks for the crowds going in. He took the sea monsters one at a time. The kraken is a giant squid, and Bishop Pontoppidan was mocked for a century for being right. The mermaid is a dugong. The hydra and Scylla are the octopus. Whales do not spout water; the blow is breath. The paper nautilus does not sail. And barnacle geese, believed for six hundred years to grow on trees, are geese. The great sea serpent he could not solve, and he says so — which is why that chapter has aged best of all. This edition prints both handbooks entire, with all 68 original figures in their places. Around them: an introduction; a head-note before each of the eight chapters, every one ending in READING AGAINST HIM, which names the specific thing in that chapter a modern reader should resist; a REGISTER OF EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE separating what Lee watched from what he was told, from what he read, from what he concluded, and closing on the two places where the instrument slipped; a descriptive list of all 68 plates saying of each whether it is evidence of an animal, evidence of a belief, or decoration; a note on the captions, because every figure is captioned twice and in nine places the two disagree — figure 24 is a skeleton, which only the List of Illustrations says; a casebook of the named sightings; a who's-who of his authorities; a glossary; a chronology; and a plain account of what has been established since 1883, including the first photograph of a living giant squid, taken a hundred and nineteen years after he wrote. Where this edition disagrees with Lee it says so and says why: the fish-god plates rest on a reading of Dagon that scholarship has abandoned, the dugong does not live in the seas most of the mermaid reports come from — and in his own footnote 41 he prints an engraving from the Roman catacombs and remarks that the creature in it is “apparently not a fish, but a seal”, which is the mermaid's whole mechanism, noticed and filed under something else. 232 pages.
