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Sea Monsters Unmasked and Sea Fables Explained by Henry Lee (1883)
Pamphlets on sea beasts produced for the International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883.
In them, a professional man of science, following in the great naturalist’s wake, exposes the follies of the past, rationalising traditional accounts through logical reasoning and recent discoveries in the marine world. With the Kraken, he notes the regularity with which sightings emerged from Scandinavia and suggests that this helps explain why the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus included it in the first edition of his System Naturae. The International Fisheries Exhibition has certainly faded from memory, but with Lee’s short volumes, we are reminded again that our connection to the sea — whether as a fantastical realm, place of research, or depleted ecosystem — is something time will not allow us to forget.
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