第1章 飞走的暗礁(5)

An interminable debate then broke out between believers and skeptics in the scholarly societies and scientific journals. The monster question inflamed all minds.

During this memorable campaign, journalists making a profession of science battled with those making a profession of wit, spilling waves of ink and some of them even two or three drops of blood, since they went from sea serpents to the most offensive personal remarks.

For six months the war seesawed. With inexhaustible zest, the popular press took potshots at feature articles from the Geographic Institute of Brazil,

the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. , at discussions in The Indian Archipelago, in Cosmos published by Father Moigno, in Petermann's Mittheilungen, and at scientific chronicles in the great French and foreign newspapers.

When the monster's detractors cited a saying by the botanist Linnaeus that nature doesn't make leaps, witty writers in the popular periodicals parodied it, maintaining in essence that nature doesn't make lunatics, and ordering their contemporaries never to give the lie to nature by believing in krakens,

sea serpents, Moby Dicks, and other all-out efforts from drunken seamen.