308 THE AQUARIAN NATURALIST. 



and evidently requiring a good Dollond's telescope to 

 see the end of it. The poetical brood of dragons, 

 griffins, basilisks, hide their diminished heads in pre- 

 sence of their mighty prototypes, at present " revisit- 

 ing the glimpses of the moon ' ' before the Crystal 

 Palace ; and we rather think that Apollo would hardly 

 have wasted his arrows upon the fabled Python had 

 he seen the original owners of some bones that now 

 figure in geological cabinets. 



The truth is, we fear, that poets are by far too 

 diffident, and, in their over-anxiety not to 



" o'erstep the modesty of nature," 



that they come very much short of the license which 

 creation fairly gives them : were it not so, we suspect 

 they would at least indulge us with greater variety. 

 They have not as yet, we can assure them, exhausted 

 the catalogue of things new and strange actually in 

 existence, monsters more terrible 



" than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived, 

 Gorgons, or Hydras, or Chimaeras dire." 



Fortunate is it for this world that the tyrants of 

 our modern seas are most of them comparatively of 

 very limited dimensions ; else we could point out some, 

 which we believe Perseus himself, backed by his Pe- 

 gasus, or rather backing his Pegasus, as we ought to 

 say, would hardly like to encounter, even were it to 

 free another Andromeda. Neither need we go far to 

 find them; the NEREIDS upon our own coasts, could 

 we but procure an Ovid to chronicle their exploits, 

 would furnish a history far more wonderful than any 

 of all his mythological outrages upon the laws of 



