porpoises appeared sharks disappeared, and they frequently re- 

 fer to the 'welcome' appearance of porpoises, whose company 

 they preferred to that of sharks." This confirms all earlier reports 

 that sharks are no match for the dolphin kind. 



Dolphins have been known to push a mattress quite empty 

 of human beings for considerable distances at sea. Possibly it is 

 merely the pushing that interests them, and not the saving of 

 any human beings that might be atop of them. 



Is there any evidence that dolphins save drowning swimmers ? 

 There is. 



In 1945 the wife of a well-known trial attorney residing in 

 Florida was saved from drowning by a dolphin.' This woman 

 had stepped into a sea with a strong undertow and was immedi- 

 ately dragged under. Just before losing consciousness, she re- 

 members hoping that someone would push her ashore. "With 

 that, someone gave me a tremendous shove, and I landed on 

 the beach, face down, too exhausted to turn over . . . when I did, 

 no one was near, but in the water almost eighteen feet out a por- 

 poise was leaping around, and a few feet beyond him another 

 large fish was also leaping." 



In this case the porpoise was almost certainly a dolphin and 

 the large fish a fishtail shark. A man who had observed the 

 events from the other side of a fence told the rescued woman 

 that this was the second time he had seen a drowning person 

 saved by a "porpoise." 



More recently, on the night of February 29, i960, Mrs. Yvonne 

 M. Bliss of Stuart fell from a boat off the east coast of Grand 

 Bahama Island in the West Indies.' "After floating, swimming, 

 shedding more clothing for what seemed an eternity, I saw a 

 form in the water to the left of me. ... It touched the side of 

 my hip and, thinking it must be a shark, I moved over to the 

 right to try to get away from it This change in my position 



^ "Saved by a Porpoise," Nattiral History, LVIII (1949), 385-386. 



* Winthrop N. Kellogg, Porpoises and Sonar, University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 14. 



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