Equally veracious additions to the story, from Pliny and Solinus, are that the monster's bones were brought to Rome by Scaurus, the skeleton measuing forty feet in length and the vertebrae six feet in circumference; from Saint Jerome, who wrote that he had seen them at Tyre; and from Pausanias, who described a nearby spring that was red with the monster's blood." (Allen)

(40 + 6 = 46, and 40 * 6 = 240.)

The description in Urania's Mirror has Deneb Kaitos at the center of her curved tail:

I am stating that this monster is a female because she is down in the sea, in the 'cup' part of the sky.

The head of Medusa, the sight of which turned men into stone, made me go back to The White Goddess by Graves. Its subtitle is 'a historical grammar of poetic myth' and the book is an eye-opener, a way to wake up from the sleep of intoxication induced in us from being born in a culture which no longer is a culture, a chaotic world of city-dwellers.

Looking for Medusa I find her in chapter 13, which probably is significant because this chapter is in the center of the book (with 26 chapters and a postscript). She is mentioned on pages 229-230, also significant numbers for us.

Chapter 13 (Palamedes and the Cranes) is tough reading (even compared to the other chapters of the book), and it is therefore not meaningful at the present stage of our investigation to look at more than the beginning of the chapter, which happens to be quite relevant for us:

"What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance agains the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy.

It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that 'music' and oldfashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from proses: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent.

As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T. E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh's own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh's foot to be the horn of a buffalo.)

And from the inability to think poetically - to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense - derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite.

This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines."