As for seeing the town, he did not even think of it, being of that breed of Britons who have their servants do their sightseeing for them. - Jules Verne

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.

"Haven't I heard of men more dried up than he is, being brought all the way from Egypt in cases covered with pictures?" "You idiot! — those were mummies; they had been dead for ages."

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?