692 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



the cultivated classes. The Byzantines had so little regard for them 

 that they caught them and salted them. It was not thought amiss to 

 make them of use in medicine according to the presumed laws of sym- 

 pathy and homoeopathy. The fat of the dolphin, eaten with wine, would 

 cure hydrocephalus ; its teeth would ease the teething of children, if 

 the proper bones were rubbed upon the gums or burned to ashes and 

 taken ; and they served as amulets to protect against sudden dangers. 

 To dream of this wonderful animal signified good, while the dreaming 

 of any other creature of the water betokened evil. 



Such representations by the ancients were the more singular, because 

 the dolphin in reality is so strikingly different from them. According 

 to science, the dolphin is the boldest, most greedy, and fiercest robber 

 of the sea, the terror of the smaller fish, especially of the flying-fish, 

 which leaps into the air in fear of it. How was it possible, in the face 

 of qualities so directly opposite, for the dolphin to be made the pet of 

 poetic and figurative art among a people who were otherwise so keen 

 in their perceptions ? The question may be answered, generally, by 

 considering the two fundamentally different points of view from which 

 the ancients and the moderns regarded the animal world. The Greeks, 

 and still more the people of the middle ages, were generally inclined 

 to put the realistic and scientific side in the background, and to look 

 at animals from the religious, moral, and sentimental point ; the hu- 

 moristic-satirical character of the romantic and Germanic animal-poetry 

 of the middle ages is a departure in another direction. It would, how- 

 ever be a mistake, and would underrate the clear comprehension of 

 reality possessed by the Greeks, to suppose that all these traits of 

 dolphin-life were mere fancy-pictures. The dolphin was observed cor- 

 rectly on the whole, but the lively imaginative faculty of the sailors 

 and fishermen, easily moved to exaggeration in contemplating the im- 

 mensity of the sea, unconsciously underlaid the natural behavior of 

 these animals with moral motives. With later peoples, those traits 

 were exaggerated on the sentimental side. Large schools of dolphins 

 followed the sailors in clear weather and amused and entertained them 

 with their arrow-like movements, and with the gi'acef ully waving lines 

 which they left on the waters, while everything else avoided the ship. 

 It was easy for them to imagine that all this was done for their sake, 

 and in consequence of the dependence of the animal upon man. The 

 fancy naturally arose that the dolphin by his movements warned men 

 of approaching storms ; and it became regarded as a power and a sym- 

 bol of the sea and sacred to Neptune. As the lion was king of the 

 animals of the land, so was the dolphin king of the animals of the 

 sea ; and as the former, according to the story, ate apes to renew his 

 strength in his old age, so did the dolphin prolong his life to three 

 hundred years by eating sea-apes. Thus a humanizing of Nature took 

 place in this fancy of the Greeks, as in everything else they looked at. 

 It was imagined that the dolphin could call with a whistle, and when 



