The vastness and mystery of the depths of the sea has naturally led to their being peopled at all ages and amidst almost all peoples with strange and monstrous forms like the Chilon, fish-like in body, but having the head of a man; or the Dies, the creature of a day, whose life's span ran its course in the hours between the rising and the setting of the sun ; or more rarely with forms of more poetic beauty, like those sweet water-wagtails, the mermaidens we have already alluded to. Our illustration is a representation of the sea lion as believed in, or at least
delineated, by the author of one of the mediaeval treatises on more or less natural history that has come under our notice. iElian descibes fish having the heads of lions, rams, and so forth; and it is, of course, sufficiently evident that when a man has once got upon that train of ideas there is nothing to hinder his turning the whole " Zoological Gardens " into the shadowy depths of ocean, and evolving ,from his inner consciousness not
only camel-fish or gazelle-fish, but fifty other equally striking creations. Rondelet, in a book published in the year 1554, gives sufficiently strange illustrations of sea-bishops and sea-monks ; and another medimval writer, Francisci Boussetti, represents in all good faith other forms equally bizarre ; but the greatest storehouse by far, so far as our own experience of these old authors goes, is to be found in the " Historia Manstrorum " of Aldrovandus, a book most copiouslyi illustrated, and full of the most extraordinary conglomerations of diverse creatures, or of wild imaginings that find no counterpart in any way in Nature at all. Of these we need give but one example, the very peculiar biped here represented.
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