The Glow Spreads West 6$ 



small boy who used to feed it bread. It came to the shore whenever 

 the boy called and, after being fed, took the boy on its back and 

 carried him to school at the other end of the lake. After many years, 

 however, the boy died but the dolphin continued to come every day 

 to the place where it had been fed and was very sad until it pined 

 away and died. This seeming fable has only within the last few 

 years been confirmed by a photographic record of a boy-dolphin 

 companionship. 



Another of Pliny's stories was apparently widely current in Rome 

 at that time and seems to have been at least based on fact. It concerns 

 a dolphin at a popular bathing beach on the north coast of Africa 

 which was tamed by the local inhabitants and which fed from their 

 hands. A Roman proconsular official then tried to go one better 

 than the locals and gave the animal a bath in scent or some form of 

 perfumed oil, whereupon it passsed out cold for a number of hours 

 and floated at the surface of the water as if dead, but finally revived 

 and made for the depths, where it remained in camera, and doubtless 

 in mortification, for some months. When it returned, it became so 

 famous and so many tourists came to see it that they forced up the 

 cost of living locally to such an extent, and caused so much trouble 

 with their pilfering and souvenir hunting, that the locals killed the 

 beast. 



Pliny also tells us of the uses made of dolphins by fishermen, and 

 recounts how people at Narbonne called them when the mullet were 

 running out of a certain narrow channel to the sea from a large salt- 

 water lagoon. Nets were erected and the dolphins apparently pa- 

 trolled the outside, driving the fish back into the shallows where they 

 could be captured. This story also has recently been rendered more 

 credible by accounts of similar behavior by another species of dol- 

 phin in Australia. 



Pliny also mentions briefly two other small cetaceans, one of which 

 he names the Tursio (perhaps the Tursiops) and which, he says, 

 "bears a strong resemblance to the dolphin; it differs from it, how- 

 ever, in a certain air of sadness." This is a rather delightful statement. 

 His remark about the other species is highly interesting from a zoo- 

 logical point of view and is really a quite astonishing historical 

 record. This reads: "In the Ganges, a river of India, is found a fish 

 called a Platanista; it has the muzzle and the tail of the dolphin and 



