while Gloster, in King Henry VI., boasts that he could “add colours to the chamæleon.”

Gower, in like manner, asserts that vainglory is

Hence, again, other moralists declare that men and women inconstant and fickle are like unto chamæleons.

It has been asserted by Avicenna that a decoction of chamæleon put into a bath will make him green-coloured that stayeth long therein, but that by degrees this verdant hue will pass away, and the man recover his natural colour, while Porta declares that “with the Gall of a Chamæleon cut into water Wheezles will be called together.” Why anyone should want to call a wheezle together he does not explain, so that the receipt, simple as it is, seems to be of no great practical value.

It has been rather a disgusting belief that if a man will lick a lizard all over he will not only be safe from the personal inconvenience of having a lizard go down his throat some day when he might be sleeping in the fields, but that he will have the power henceforward of healing any sore to which he applies his tongue.

Our ancestors held many strange beliefs respecting serpents and snakes—one of these was they were created from hair, “women’s hairs especially”—as one old writer is careful to emphasize—“because they are naturally longer than men’s.” One old authority, our oft-quoted Porta, hesitates not to say that “we have experienced also that the hairs of a horse’s mane laid in the waters become serpents, and our friends have tried the same,” and he goes on to mention as a truism to be almost apologized for from its self-evident character, that “no man denies but that serpents are easily gendred of man’s flesh, specially of his marrow.” Ælianus in like manner declares that a dead man’s marrow, being putrified, becomes a serpent. Florentinus affirms that basil chewed and laid in the sun will engender serpents.⁠[120]

Another strange idea was that serpents conferred the power of invisibility. Thus John Aubrey, an antiquary and author, and one of the earliest Fellows of the Royal Society, gives in full faith the following recipe: “Take on Midsummer night at xii, when all the planets are above the earth, a serpent, and kill him, and skinne him, and dry him in the shade, and bring it to a powder. Hold it in your hand, and you will be invisible.” His book entitled “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme” is a perfect storehouse of old-world superstitions, an inexhaustible mine of quaint imaginings.

The “pretious stone” theory that we have already encountered in one or two other cases, the toad being the most notable, is in full force again amongst the various strange notions concerning serpents. The recipe for its possession, given by Jacobus Hollerius, is simplicity itself, as it is merely necessary that the “snake be tyed by the tayle with a corde, and hanged up, and a vessell full of water set below; after a certayne time he will avoyde out of his mouth a stone.” The stone is of great medicinal value; for instance, “it fullye and wholelye helpes the partye that hath the dropsye,” by merely being attached to the body of the sufferer, and in divers other ways that we need not stay to particularize, proves itself a stone of price. Jordanus, amongst his other Indian experiences, came across serpents with horns, evidently the cerastes or horned viper, and others with precious stones. Tennant tells us that the Cingalese believe that the stomach of the cobra contains a stone of inestimable value, and this belief, absurd as we deem it, is really hardly more far-fetched than such a story as pearls being found in oyster-shells would appear to a man who heard it for the first time.

Snakes and serpents, like most other repulsive things, have found their way into the pharmacopœia and the menu. Galen tells us that the Egyptians used to eat vipers as other people did eels, and it is a very old-world superstition that viper’s flesh is an antidote to the viper’s poison. In classic and mediæval days a famous remedy, originally known as mithridate or theriaca, and later on as Venice treacle, was held to owe much of its virtue as a vermifuge and antidote to all kinds of poison to the vipers that formed one of its ingredients. It was retained in the London Pharmacopœia until about a hundred years ago. Its constituent parts changed somewhat from time to time; at one period we see it contained seventy-three ingredients. The vipers were added to the horrible mess by Andromachus, the physician to the Emperor Nero,⁠[121] and became a leading element in the prescription. The name treacle was at one time applied to any confection or syrup, and it is only in these latter days that the name has become associated exclusively with the syrup of molasses: it is derived from the Greek Therion, a name given to the viper, so that the schoolboys’ lunch of bread and treacle is the direct etymological outcome of the abominable adder’s broth of the Roman emperor.⁠[122]

One often sees in these ancient remedies a foreshadowing of the homœopathic notion of like to like; thus Porta prescribes “a present remedy” for the poison of the viper, declaring that “the viper itself, if you slay her, and strip off her skin, cut off her head and tail, cast away all her entrails, boil her like an Eele, and give her to one that she hath bitten, it will cure him,” but in another place he says “for serpent’s bites I have found nothing more excellent than the earth which is brought from the isle of Malta, for the least dust of it put into their mouths kills them presently.” There is evidently here some sort of connection endeavoured to be established between the escape of St. Paul while in Malta from the evil effects of the poison of a viper and this present prescription, and it no doubt arose from the old legend that, like St. Patrick in Ireland, St. Paul, after his experience of them, banished all snakes from the island. Once granted that a serpent cannot live on the soil of Malta, it follows almost as a matter of course that a little of this same soil administered to it anywhere the wide world over will prove fatal to it. The recipe is, nevertheless, a little vague, as it deals exclusively with the destruction of the serpent, which is not at all the same thing as the restoration to health of the sufferer from its poison fangs.

Prevention being better than cure, the hint that Cogan gives in his “Haven of Health” should prove of value. “The setting of Lauender within the house in floure pots must needes be very wholesome, for it driueth away venemous wormes, both by strawing and by the sauour of it,” and he adds that “being drunke in wine it is a remedie against poyson.” Tusser, in his book on Husbandry, gives a long list of “strowing herbes,” their fragrance and remedial value being held in high esteem by our forefathers:—

The bunches of flowers that are still presented to the Judges on the opening of the Law Courts are the graceful and now happily needless developments of the bunches of herbs that were once placed on their desks to avert the dangers of the gaol fever, that with its noxious breath slew not the hapless prisoners alone, but the judges on the bench, and administered wild justice on all alike for the contempt of sanitary laws, and for the brutality that was rampant and supreme.⁠[124]

Fennel was, according to our forefathers, held in esteem by the serpents themselves, and one scarcely wonders that this should be so, if it be true that “so soone as they taste of it they become young again, and with the juice thereof repair their sight.” How this juice is applied externally by the serpent is not explained, but it very naturally suggested the idea to the medical men of the Middle Ages that what was so good for serpents might prove equally valuable to suffering humanity, hence “to repair a man’s sight that is dim” nothing better than fennel could be found, though they hesitated to promise also to the human subject rejuvenescence.

The Syrians, according to one venerable authority, had a most singular defence for their country, the land being full of snakes that would do no harm to the natives even if they trod upon them, but which eagerly assailed the people of any other nation and destroyed them. Naturally therefore the Syrians cherished such a valuable protection, though such a state of things would hardly accord with modern notions of free trade and the intercourse of nations. The discovery of one wonder frequently leads to knowledge of others, and Aristotle has a companion story in his “History of Animals,” of scorpions that in Caria sting to death the natives of the country, but do no harm to strangers. In like manner, according to Maundevile, in the island called Silha, wherever that may be, “the men of that yle seen comonely that the Serpentes and the wilde Bestes of that Countree nee will not don non harm, ne touchen with evylle, no strange man that entreth into that Contree, but only to men that ben born of the same Countree.” This differential treatment seems distinctly hard on the aborigines.⁠[125]

“It is observable,” quoth the author of the “Miracles of Art and Nature,” that “in Crete there is bred no Serpents or Venomous Beasts or Worms, Ravenous or hurtful Creatures, so their Sheep graze very securely without any Shepheard; yet if a Woman happen to bite a Man anything hard he will hardly be cured of it,” a statement which brings forth the very natural conclusion that “if this be true, then the last part of the Priviledge foregoing (of breeding no hurtful Creature) must needs be false.”

Amongst various familiar country beliefs lasting even to the present day is the one summed up in the well-known expression, “deaf as an adder.” It has for centuries been an accepted belief that the adder lays one ear upon the ground, and closes the other with its tail, and it doubtless has its origin in that passage in the psalms of David where it states that “the deaf adder stoppeth her ears, and will not heed the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely,” and we meet with this idea over and over again in our own literature. Thus Shakespeare writes in King Henry VI.—

And, again, in his Troilus and Cressida we find the passage—

In Orlando Furioso, too, we find an interesting reference to the old fancy:—

Many varieties of serpents were known to the ancients, and some of them, as the Cerastes, are quite recognizable from the descriptions given, but of others we have no means of identification. The two-headed Amphisbæna, for example, that was credited with such venomous malignity that nothing but twice the normal power of offence sufficed for its deadly attack. The Amphisbæna was an article of faith with Nicander, who was the first to introduce it to the scientific world of his name, and it is referred to by Galen, Pliny, Ælian, and many other ancient writers, who gravely describe this especially objectionable reptile, “a small kind of serpent which moveth backward and forward, and hath two heads, one at either extreme.” The creature is now entirely lost to science.

Aldrovandus, in his history of serpents, gives an illustration of the basilisk, a serpentine form, but having eight legs, and on its head a crown. Another of his figures shows us a serpentine form again, this time with two legs, the moderation in this direction being fully compensated by the gift of seven heads of human form, while another has the serpent-like body, but to this are added two legs and feet like those of a cock, and the creature has six cocks’ heads. All these creatures are put forth and described in all seriousness, so it is evident that the author must either himself have been excessively credulous, or that he must have expected to find his readers so. It is manifest that such inventions are of the lamest possible type. Nothing could be easier or more fatuous than to fill a folio volume with serpents having three cats’ heads, five lions’ heads, seven bisons’ heads, or twenty rats’ heads, and distribute legs in the same liberal and senseless manner. His drawing, fig. 23, of a two-headed lizard is the nearest approach we can give our readers to the Amphisbæna.

Burton tells us that in Samogitia, a small province in Poland, the people nourish amongst them “a kind of four-footed serpents, above three handfuls in length, which they worship as their household gods, and if mischance do happen to any of their family, it is imputed presently to some want of due observations of these ugly creatures.” Some old writers tell us of hairy serpents, and depict a thing something like the well-known larva of the tiger-moth, the caterpillar popularly known as the “woolly bear,” and familiar enough to all dwellers in the country, the only difference, though that a very serious one, being that the woolly bear is barely three inches long, while the hairy serpents are stretched to any number of feet that the credulity of the narrator will permit.

Fig. 24 is a facsimile from one of the illustrations in Munster’s “de Africæ regionibus,” and represents the sort of thing that he would have us believe was to be found in his days in Africa, that great home of the weird and mysterious. The perspective effect of the coils of the upper creature, as they recede in the distance towards the horizon, suggests a terrific length, something far exceeding any of the possibilities of the present day, but this may be only a slip of draughtmanship, or a polite desire on the part of the two-headed reptile not to crowd up its three-headed companion.

The asp, from being freely found in Egypt and other parts of North Africa, was well known to the naturalists of Greece and Rome, and its deadly nature fully understood, though the facts are perhaps rather against them when they assert that they are such affectionate creatures that they are always found in pairs and cannot live without their mates. We are told that should one of the pair be killed, this sweet connubial bliss is exchanged for deadly ferocity and instant revenge. The unhappy man is closely pursued and relentlessly tracked, and finds no safety amongst his fellows, as the avenger knows him from all others, and will not be turned aside. Distance is no object, and difficulties no hindrance, and all that the luckless individual can do is to take to his heels with all celerity, and at the earliest opportunity embark in a boat or swim a river, and thus shake off his relentless pursuer.

Democritus tells us that if we mingle the blood of certain birds together a serpent will be engendered. Whoso eateth of this serpent shall know the language of birds, and be able to join in the conversation of any or all of the great feathered host, singing with the lark, cawing with the rook, hooting with the owl, and being thoroughly conversant with all that passes between them.

Maundevile tells us, in his wonderful “Voiage and Travaile,” of an island where one finds “a kynde of Snayles that ben so grete that many persones may loggen hem in hur Schelles, as men woulde done in a litylle Hous”—a sufficiently striking feature in the landscape of that now unknown land.

Snails entered largely into the rustic Materia Medica, and not only indeed into rural practice but into the most courtly and exclusive circles, for we find Sir John Floyer, the physician to Charles II., prescribing thus for dulness of hearing: “Take a grey snaile, pricke him, and putt ye water which comes from him into ye eare and stop it with black woole, and it will cure.” He left behind him a folio volume of such-like valuable recipes, and the manuscript may yet be seen in the Cathedral Library at Lichfield. He was a native of that city.

Spiders were also deemed of great remedial value. When a child has whooping cough, one of the parents should catch a spider and hold it over the head of the patient, repeating three times, “Spider, as you waste away, whooping cough no longer stay.” The spider must then be hung up in a bag over the mantel-piece, and when it has dried up the cough will have disappeared.⁠[126]

Burton, the author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” writes: “Being in the country in the vacation time, not many years ago, at Lindley in Leicestershire, my father’s house, I first observed this amulet of a spider in a nutshell wrapped in silk, so applied for an ague by my mother. This methought was most absurd and ridiculous. I could see no warrant for it, till at length, rambling amongst authors, as I often do, I found this very medicine in Dioscorides, approved by Matthiolus, and I began to have a better opinion of it, and to give more credit to amulets when I saw it in some parties answer to experience.” Gerarde, in his “Historie of Plants,” found that such a remedy, however good in theory, however supported by ancient authority, would not bear the strain of actual use. He shall however speak for himself in his own refreshingly quaint way. “It is needlesse,” he writes, “here to alledge those things that are added touching the little wormes or magots, found in the heades of the Teasell,⁠[127] which are to be hanged about the necke, for they are nothing else but most vaine and trifling toies, as my selfe haue proved a little before, hauing a most grieuous ague, and of long continuance: notwithstanding physicke charmes, these wormes hanged about my necke, spiders put into a nutshell and divers such foolish toies that I was constrained to take by phantasticke people’s procurement: notwithstanding, I say, my helpe came from God himselfe, for these medicines, and all other such things, did me no good at all.” It is passing strange that such so-called remedies, so easily proved valueless, should have held their ground for centuries, and are doubtless even now in the byways of our land as firmly believed in as they were nigh two thousand years ago. When one of our own family was ailing, a woman in the little Wiltshire village where we were then staying strongly advised us to drop some peas down the well as an infallible means of restoration to health!

Bees were held to be bred out of putrefying carcases, an idea that doubtless arose in very early times, as we find it referred to by Virgil and other ancient authors, and the Biblical story of the swarm of bees found by Sampson in the carcase of the lion that he slew would be held as confirmation, though anyone reading the story⁠[128] carefully would see that no such inference could be drawn from it. Many weeks had elapsed between the slaying of the lion and the discovery of the honey, ample time for the birds and beasts of prey to have cleared away the flesh, and for the heat of the sun to have dried up all putrefaction and rendered the skeleton a sufficiently cleanly and suitable place for the wild bees to form their combs within. Herodotus tells us that when the Amathusians revenged themselves on Onesilus, by whom they had been besieged, by cutting off his head and hanging it over one of their city gates, the skull presently alone remained, and in this hollow chamber a swarm of bees settled and filled it with honeycomb.

The fourth Georgic of Virgil, which is devoted to the subject of bees, gives account of a simple method whereby the race of bees, if diminished or lost, might be replenished. He speaks of it as an art practised in Egypt, and it is easy to see that it originated in accounts of bees swarming in the dead bodies of animals. The process was to kill a young bullock by stopping up his nostrils, so that the skin should be unbroken by any wound, and then leaving it for nine days in a position where it would be undisturbed, when:—

In this account we see clearly enough that the belief in the generation of the bees from the putrefying body is frankly accepted. The author of the “Speculum Mundi,” hundreds of years after the Georgics were written, declares that a dead horse breeds wasps, that from the body of an ass proceed humble bees, while a mule produces hornets. Those who would have bees must seek them in a dead calf, though he adds the curious limitation, “if the west winde blow.” He goes on to say “whether the bees in Samson’s dead lion were bred anywhere else no man knoweth.” As an Englishman, more familiar with the possibilities of a dead calf than with those of a dead lion, he declines to commit himself to an opinion as to what is or is not possible in far distant lands over sea.⁠[130]

The strange association of ideas that we have seen in many other instances may be well seen again in the notion that if one pounds up those luminous creatures of the night, glowworms, the result will be an ink that will render any writing performed by its aid visible in the dark. Winstanley, in his “Pathway to Knowledge,” gives a simple receipt for the manufacture of this useful ink, and other writers are content to copy him, or each other, in the laudable desire to spread abroad the knowledge of this luminous fluid. One can easily realize that such a preparation might at times be really very useful.

Turning, in conclusion, our attention to the creatures of sea and stream, we at once encounter the favourite mediæval theory that all creatures of the land had their marine counterparts. “There is nothing,” says the comparatively modern writer, Camden, “bred in any part of Nature, but the same is in the sea;” while Olaus Magnus affirms that “there be fishes like to dogs, cows, calves, horses, eagles, dragons, and what not.” These mysterious denizens of the deep were an unfailing resource in the romances and poems of the Middle Ages, and an article of faith with the writers on natural history. On the Assyrian slabs we see the monster “upward man and downward fish,” while the mermaid we all recognize as a most familiar instance of the presence of creatures at least semi-human in the broad and mysterious expanse of ocean. Bœwulf, the Saxon poet, writes of “the sea-wolf of the abyss, the mighty sea-woman.” The quotation is not altogether complimentary in its sentiment: no lady of one’s acquaintance would feel flattered on being addressed as a sea-wolf. But while a certain halo of romance has in these later days gathered round the idea of the mermaid, those who really believed in her gave her credit for deeds considerably more heinous than combing her flowing hair in the sunlight, since her beauty was a snare and destruction to all who came within its fatal influence.

Sir Thomas Browne, in his merciless dissection of the vulgar beliefs of his day, writes, with his accustomed quaintness and equally accustomed sound common sense, “that all Animals of the Land are in their kinde in the Sea, although received as a Principle, is a tenet very questionable and that will admit of restraint. For some in the Sea are not to be matcht by any enquiry at Land and hold those shapes which terrestrious formes approach not, as may be observed in the Moonfish and the severall sorts of Raias, Torpedos, Oysters, and many more, and some there are in the Land which were never mentioned to be in Sea, as Panthers, Hyænas, Cammells, Molls, and others, which carry no name in Ichthology, nor are to be found in the exact descriptions of Rondoletius, Gesner, and Aldrovandus. Again, though many there be which make out their nominations, as the Sea-serpents and others, yet there are also very many that bear the names of Animalls at Land, which hold no resemblance in corporall configuration, wherein while some are called the Fox, the Dog, or Frog-fish, and are known by common names with those at Land, as their describers attest, they receive not these appellations from a totall similitude in figure, but any concurrence in common accidents, in colour, condition, or single conformation. As for Sea-Horses, which much confirm this assertion in their common descriptions, they are but Grotesco delineations which fill up empty spaces in Maps, and meer pictoriall inventions, not any Physicall shapes. That which the Ancients named Hippocampus is a little animall about six inches long, and not preferred beyond the classis of Insects. That they termed Hippopotamus, an amphibious animall about the River Nile, so little resembleth an horse that, except the feet, it better makes out a swine. Although it be not denied that some in the water doe carry a justifiable resemblance to some at Land, yet are the major part which bear their names unlike, nor doe they otherwise resemble the creatures on earth than they on earth the constellations which passe under Animall names in heaven: nor the Dogfish at Sea much more make out the Dog of the Land than that his cognominall or namesake in the heavens.” He then goes on to show that this belief restrains Omnipotence and abridges the variety of creation, making the creatures of one element but a counterpart of the other.

This belief in sea-monsters of all kinds was naturally not a chance that a man like Aldrovandus could miss. He gives his imagination full scope, or perhaps we should rather say his credulity, as he introduces these creatures to us as things as real as a rabbit; his sea-monk, for instance, with tonsured human head, arms replaced by fins, and legs by fishy tail, being as matter of fact as one’s vicar. Fig. 25 is given by him in all good faith as the true presentment of a sea-bishop, though not at all our notion of a bishop in his see. The right hand, it will be seen, is giving the benediction. The dragon of the deep, shown in fig. 26, aims at being terrible, but merely succeeds in being feeble. We cannot but feel that the draughtsman here failed to reach our ideal; for one has certainly seen, many representations of land-dragons far more fear-inspiring than this bloated monster with ears like a King Charles spaniel, and tail like a rat. This illustration is from another source, the work of Ambrosinus on the same subject, published “permissu superiorum” in the year 1642. While the book is as quaint and grotesque as any of its rivals, the skill of the artist has in divers cases not paralleled the gifts of description of the author.

The “monstrosus sus marinus,” or terrible sow of the sea, or more especially perhaps of Aldrovandus (fig. 27), will surely fully come up to everyone’s expectation of what a marine pig should be like. Catching a weasel asleep should be a comparatively easy task to circumventing sus marinus; it seems such a peculiarly wide-awake animal. Possibly in the struggle for existence in the watery depths its toothsome flesh may place it in jeopardy, and Nature may have bestowed upon it these numerous eyes to enable it to evade dragons and other foes having a penchant for pork; a rather unexpected addition to the various better-known examples of that comfortable doctrine for the well-to-do, the survival of the fittest.

Purchas tells us of a fish called the Angulo or Hog-fish. “It hath,” he says, “as it were two hands, and a tail like a target, which eateth like pork, and whereof they make lard, and it hath not the savour or taste of fish. It feedeth on the grasse that groweth on the banks of the river and never goeth out; it hath a mouthe like the mozell of an ox, and there be of them that weigh five hundred pound a piece.” This is found, he tells us, in the River Congo.

Another of the strange creatures of ocean is shown in fig. 28. It is somewhat startling to reflect that our ancestors had at least the expectation that such a monster might at any moment rise alongside their vessel and address them in the peremptory tones that the figure suggests: and it must be borne in mind that these illustrations are not a tithe of the strange imaginings that even this one old book sets forth, though it is needless to multiply examples from it. We have carefully drawn our figures in facsimile from the originals, and have naught extenuated, nor set down aught in malice. They are fairly typical examples of the sort of thing that is encountered on page after page.⁠[131]

In the excellent book of Rondeletius (doctoris medici et medicinæ in schola monspeliensi professoris regii), published in the year 1554, on the subject of marine fishes, the illustrations are full of spirit and life. Amongst these fish of the ocean we find the sea-bishop, sea-monk, &c., all over again, and such creatures as the sea-lion, fig. 29; this latter, except for his scaly hide, has nothing very suggestively aquatic about him. The book, in addition to such impossibilities, contains very good and life-like representations of the sun-fish, sturgeon, hammer-headed shark, ray, and many others.

The author of the “Speculum Mundi” confirms all these wonders, and adds his quota to the general store. He affirms that, “In the year 1526 there was taken in Norway, neare to a seaport called Elpoch, a certain fish resembling a mitred bishop, who was kept alive six days after his taking, and there was, as the author of Du Bartas his summarie reporteth, one Ferdinand Alvares, Secretarie to the storehouse of the Indians, who faithfully witnesseth that he had seene not farre off from the Promontorie of the Moon, a young Sea-man coming out of the Waters, who stole fishes from the fishermen and ate them raw. Neither is Olaus Magnus silent on these things, for he also saith there be monsters in the sea, as it were imitating the shape of a man, having a dolefull kinde of sounde or singing. There be also sea-men of an absolute proportion in their whole body; these are sometimes seene to climbe up the ships in the night times, and suddenly to depresse that part upon which they sit; and if they abide long the whole ship sinketh. Yea (saithe he), this I adde from the faithfull assertions of the Norway fishers, that when such are taken, if they be not presently let go again, there ariseth such a fierce tempest, with an horrid noise of those kinde of creatures and other sea-monsters there assembled, that a man would think the verie heaven were falling, and the vaulted roofe of the world running to ruine, insomuch that the fishermen have much ado to escape with their lives; whereupon they confirmed it as a law amongst them that if any chanced to hang such a fish upon his hook he should suddenly cut the line and let him go on. But these sudden tempests are very strange, and how they arise with such violent speed exceeds the bounds of ordinary admiration. Whereupon it is again supposed that these monsters are verie devils, and by their power such strange storms are raised. Howbeit for my part I think otherwise, and do much rather affirm that these storms, in my judgment, are thus raised, namely, by the thickening and breaking of the aire; which the snortling, rushing, and howling of these beasts, assembled in an innumerable companie, causeth. For it is certain that sounds will break and alter the aire (as I have heard it of a citie freed from the plague by the thundering noise of cannons), and also I suppose that the violent rushing of these beasts causeth much water to flie up and thicken the aire, and by their howling and snortling under the waters they do blow up, and as it were attenuate the waves, and make them arise in a thinner substance than at other times; so that Nature, having all these helps, in an instant worketh to the amazement of the mariners, and often to the danger of their lives. Besides, shall we think that spirits use to feed, and will be so foolish as to go and hang themselves on an hook for a bait? They may have occult properties (as the loadstone hath) to work strange feats, and yet be neither spirits nor devils; for experience likewise teacheth that they die sooner or later after their taking, neither can a spirit have flesh and bones as they have.”

The monsters of the deep are best seen at the times of the equinox, “for then,” says Pliny, “by the whirlwinds, rains and tempests which rush with violence from the rugged mountains, the seas are turned up from the very bottom, and thus the billows roll and raise these beasts out of the deep parts of the ocean.” It certainly seems a much more reasonable theory that the storms produce the beasts than that the beasts produce the storms.

On an antique seal we remember to have seen a sea-elephant, a creature having the forelegs, tusks, trunk, and great flapping ears of the African elephant, yet terminating in the body of a fish, and duly furnished with piscine tail and fins. This outrageous combination would seem to indicate the limit possible to absurdity in this direction. When the ancient writers would desire to people the vast unknown of air and sea, their thoughts naturally turned to those creatures of the land with which they were more familiar. Hence, the denizens of the air or ocean are not really creations at all, but adaptations, wings or fins being added to horses, lions and the like, according to the new element in which they were to figure. Of these the sea-horses that drew the chariot of Neptune through the waves, or the winged steed Pegasus, are examples that at once occur to one’s mind.

The sea-horse according to some authorities is found floating on the ice between Britain and Norway, and is taken by the whalers for the oil he contains. He is described as having a head like a horse, and as sometimes neighing, but his hoofs are said to be cloven like those of a cow, while his hinder parts are those of a fish. This creature would appear to be now quite lost to science. The sea-horse naturally suggests the idea of the sea-unicorn, depicted as of equine form, but having the hinder parts piscine in character. The horn of the sea-unicorn occasionally brought home by merchants and mariners was probably the “sword” of the swordfish or the tusk of the narwhal, as it is often mentioned that it was able to penetrate the ribs of ships, and later experience has proved that an encounter between swordfish or narwhal and ships has occasionally taken place. The tusk of the narwhal is a spiral tapering rod of ivory, sometimes attaining to the length of eight or ten feet. Purchas mentions a horn of a sea-unicorn that was presented by Frobisher to his sovereign, and preserved at Windsor, and the name of this great arctic voyager naturally suggests that this horn was the tusk of a narwhal, a creature of the northern seas. One old writer speaks of the horn as a “wreathy spire,” a description which admirably accords with the narwhal tusk. The fact once established that there were creatures in the sea with horns like unicorns, it was at once assumed that they had the horse-like form assigned to the land-unicorn, and in some of the old authors the sea-unicorn is represented as of purely equine form, plus the horn.⁠[132]

In a book published in 1639, entitled “A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse,” we find this question asked, “Whether doth a dead body in a shippe cause the shippe to sail slower, and if it doe, what is thought to be the reason thereof?” The answer to the query is that “the shippe is as insensible of the living as the dead, and as the living make it goe the faster, so the dead make it not goe the slower; for the dead are no Rhemoras to alter the course of her passage, though some there be that thinke so, and that by a kind of mournful sympathy.”⁠[133] The potent influence of the remora or sucking-fish to arrest the progress of a ship by merely adhering to its keel is a curious fancy that has been handed on for centuries. Pliny and many other ancient writers had full belief in this foe to the mariner, and references to it in much more recent authors are by no means uncommon. Thus Ben Jonson alludes to it in the lines—

While Spenser in his “Visions of the World’s Vanity,” writes—

We may indeed be thankful that this mysterious power, worse even than the more prosaic barnacles and other sea impedimenta that plague the modern shipowner by fouling the bottom of his good ship, and so retarding her course, seems to be no longer exercised. The merchantman speeding home with perishable cargo, the yachtsman burning to carry off the challenge cup, the great record-breaking Atlantic liner, carrying under heavy penalty for delay Her Majesty’s mails, would all be terribly hampered in their several ambitions in presence of so potent yet so apparently insignificant a foe. Well might Spenser add—

One old writer feeling the impossibility of giving a satisfactory explanation of the marvel is content to say “of which there can be no more reason given than of the loadstone drawing iron; neither is it possible to shew the cause of all secrets in Nature,” a statement as true to-day as the day it was written, though this particular secret of Nature has in the interval been disestablished.

That the dolphin was the swiftest of all living creatures, more rapid than a bird, swifter than an arrow shot from a bow, will probably be an entirely new idea to most of our readers, yet such was the ancient belief. The dolphin occurs very freely in blazonry, on ancient coinage, and in classic and renaissance decoration, and it is almost always represented either as “embowed,” that is to say, bent round like a bow, such being the significance of the heraldic term, or else it is introduced with its lithe body coiled gracefully round an anchor or trident. In either case the representation suggests an easy-going and leisurely state of affairs that is very different to the picture conjured up by the arrowy rush of the creature through the waves, as Pliny paints it for us.⁠[134]

It is a very old belief that the dolphin has an especial fondness for man. “Of a man he is nothing afraid, neither avoideth from him as a stranger: but of himselfe meeteth their ships, plaieth and disporteth himselfe, and fetcheth a thousand friskes, and gambols before them. He will swimme along by the mariners, as it were for a wager, who should make way most speedily, and alwaies outgoeth them, saile they with never so good a forewind.” The representation of the dolphin with the anchor is not simply a type of maritime supremacy, but is a distinct illustration of this belief in the dolphin’s kindly regard for man. Thus Camerarius asserts that “when tempests arise, and sea-men cast their anchor, the dolphin, from its love to man, twines itself round it, and directs it, so that it may more safely lay hold of the ground.”

The works of the ancient writers abound with illustrations of the friendly regard of the dolphin for mankind. Thus in one wonderful story we have a schoolboy, the son of a poor man, who had to travel each day from Baianum to Puteoli, who used at the water’s edge to call a dolphin to his aid. The dolphin would at once respond to the call, and the boy used to mount upon his back and be taken across the sea, and be brought back again at night. This went on for some years, and at last, when the boy fell sick and died, his constitution probably not being able to stand the constant wetting and exposure, the dolphin was inconsolable, and promptly died of a broken heart. In another story, equally veracious, the rider was so unfortunate as to pierce himself with one of the sharp spines of the dorsal fin, and an artery being severed, he bled to death. The dolphin, seeing the water stained with blood, and finding that his rider did not sit on his back in the light and active way that had been his wont, concluded that some catastrophe had happened, and when he realized the full truth, resolved not to outlive him whom he had affectionately loved, and therefore ran himself with all his might upon the shore, and so perished. Pliny, Mecænas, Fabianus, Flavius Alfius, Ælian, Aulus Gellius, Apion, Egesidemus, Theophrastus, and many other old writers, all give equally surprising illustrations of this wonderful love of the dolphin for mankind.

The dolphin is also a great lover of music, and equally wonderful stories are told in illustration of this taste also. Another well-known belief in connection with it is the imaginary brilliancy of its changeful colours when dying. The idea has been a favourite one with poets in all ages: an example from Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” will suffice as an illustration:—