--- DOLPHIN

While the Dolphin, like the nautilus, has a veritable existence, and may be duly found amongst the works of nature, it has also, like the nautilus again, served as the foundation for a considerable amount of mythical lore. Thus Pliny, in his so-called Natural History, from which we have already drawn so many curious extracts, writes -"The swiftest of all other living creatures whatsoever, and not of sea-fish only, is the dolphin ; quicker than the flying fowl, swifter than the arrow shot out of a bow." The dolphin, so termed, of the mediaeval heralds is a purely conventional form, having no counter-part whatever in Nature. "They are much deceived," wrote an authority on, natural history a little more than a hundred years ago, "who imagine Dolphins to be of the Figure they are usually represented on Signs ; that Error being more owing to the unbridled License of Statuaries or Painters than to any such Thing found in Fact." A much earlier writer, Gillius, tells us that when he was "in a Ship where many Dolphins were taken, he observed them so to deplore with Groans, Lamentations, and a Flood of Tears their Condition, that he himself, out of Compassion, could not forbear weeping, and so threw one that he observed to groan more than ordinary (the Fisherman being asleep) into the Water again, as choosing rather to damage the Fisherman than not to relieve the Miserable. But this gave him but little Rest, for all the Others increased their Groans, as seeming, by not obscure Signs, to beg the same Deliverance." Another well-known belief in connection with the dolphin is the imaginary brilliancy of its supposititiously changeful colours when, having failed to find any one, like Gillius, compassionate enough to throw it overboard, it presently succumbs to its hard fate. The idea has been a favourite one with poets in all ages, but one example from Byron's " Childe Harald's Pilgrimage" will suffice as an illustration :

" Parting day

Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues

With a new colour as it gasps away ;

The last still loveliest, till-'tis gone-and all is gray."

According to some of the ancient writers, the eyes of the dolphin were in those most unlikely and unserviceable places, their blade-bones ; they were also said to dig graves for their dead on the sandy shores of the sea, and to follow them to their burial in mournful procession. They were, too, an excellent means of travelling when other means of locomotion were not available. Thus the fifty daughters of Nereus travelled in safety on their backs, we are told in classic mythology in the dry-as-dust style of such fountains of knowledge as are available for reference ordinarily; but these statements help us but little to realise the scene that struck the eyes or the imaginations of the ancients when this bevy of charming girls, a good fifty strong, rode hither and thither in happy abandon in the brilliant summer sun-light of the azure Mediterranean Sea, their steeds the willing dolphins; a scene as unlike the frowsy omnibuses, the dreary chariots of moody men and women, that loom through the murk of a London fog, or that fill to suffocation with resentful fellow passengers, when the prolonged drizzle becomes a heavy downpour, as one can possibly imagine.

The dolphin's love of music, again, was a firm article of faith to the ancients, and most of our readers are no doubt acquainted with the story of the sweet singer, Arion, who, forced to leap into the sea to escape the cruelty of the sailors, escaped to land on the back of a dolphin-one of many that had long followed the ship in rapturous appreciation of the sweet melodies of the singer; and how Arion

" With harmonious strains Requites his hearer for his friendly pains."