NONSUCH 



horse. When Aristotle and the poets of classical 

 Greece wrote of Hippocampus they had in mind a 

 wholly mythical sea-monster, a dragon, half horse 

 and half fish. They thoroughly believed in this 

 piscine-centaur and so there soon swam into their 

 ken a half horse and half caterpillar and Hippo- 

 campus being only imaginarily " preoccupied " as 

 our taxonomists would say, it naturally fitted the 

 new natatory reality. Medicine evolving slowly, out 

 of witch doctors and magic, and museums not yet 

 having come in, any creature as strange as a sea- 

 horse would, in those early days, be considered from 

 the point of view of drugs. So we find attributed to 

 it a marvellous list of panaceas. If I had only had a 

 library of early chirurgeons on the Arcturus and 

 a little more faith I would not so readily have con- 

 signed my dried seahorse to the deep, but would 

 have burned it and consumed its ashes in wine and 

 thereby have guarded against pain-in-the-side, or, 

 taken merely mixed with water, my canker and 

 leprosy would have been alleviated. Best of all, had 

 I stirred my Hippocampus ashes with oil of mar- 

 joram or liquid pitch and rubbed it on my bald pate 

 a glorious head of hair would have resulted. 



We may laugh at these prescriptions of old, but 

 what except a feeling of shame shall we cherish to- 

 ward an elaborate volume of seashore life, printed 

 within three years, which states that Hippocampus 

 is a primitive ganoid, that it lives to be a century old, 

 and that it inhabits depths under great pressure! 

 Before we ever smugly deride the ignorance or 



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