FISHES IN ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY. 19 



are too numerous for recapitulation.* Endowed by tra- 

 dition with perfectly super-cetaceous virtues, it was accepted 

 by all, mariner and landsman alike, as an amiable ally. 

 The scientific mythologist, as may easily be imagined, has 

 made much of the dolphin, but ingenuity can never get 

 more out of the old myth than that the natural habits of 

 this animal endeared it in the past to all sea-goers, just as 

 they have endeared it to those of the present. Eros, 

 therefore, the blithest of gods, rides on a dolphin — Amphi- 

 trite has one for a guardian — and when out a merry-making 

 all the jolly sea-magnates have dolphins tumbling about 

 them. They brought Hesiod's body to shore ; and Ulysses, 

 in gratitude for their saving Telemachus, wore their e^gy 

 upon both signet-ring and shield. All fish are benign 

 in fairy tale, but the sum of their united amiabilities 

 hardly equals the services conferred in myth and legend 

 by the dolphin upon the human race. Well does the swift 

 cetacean deserve its place among the stars. 



In contradistinction to the dolphin, a purely Hellenic 

 creation, we may place the world-wide, cosmopolitan, turtle. 

 Though a creature to laugh over when we see it creeping 

 stealthily about on tiptoe, as if it were abroad for the pur- 

 pose of picking pockets, it has a very notable place in myth, 

 for it was almost universally reverenced. The East believes 

 that the world rests upon a tortoise, which rests upon no- 

 thing — and what a grand old testacean it is, this Vedic turtle, 



* " They loved music, especially of the * hydraulic sort ' (whatever 

 that sort may have been), and they were easily tamed, and fondly 

 attached to men. Pliny says he should never end all the stories he 

 knows of the obliging behaviour of dolphins, who allowed children 

 to ride on their backs. One of them — as attested by Maecenas 

 and Fabianus — in the reign of Augustus, carried a boy every morning 

 to school, and when the lad died the dolphin pined away waiting for 

 him on the shore, and at last expired of gritf."— Frances P. Cobbe. 



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