V ' Among the Sharks and Whales' 431 



It is certainly a little difificult to understand why a 

 sword-fish, gifted, for some mysterious and utterly 

 inexplicable reason, with a nose rivalling that of 

 Slawkenbergius, should enter into treaties offensive, 

 if not defensive, with at one time a marine mammal 

 and at another with a cartilaginous fish, to attack 

 a harmless whale merely for the fun of the thing. 

 It is true that governments do this sort of thing 

 often enough ; but then they have a reason, though 

 it be a more or less disreputable one, which the 

 marine animals, not having a party to be supported 

 at any price, can hardly lay claim to. 



True or not, this nose-long ferocity of the sword- 

 fish is a very old story. Pliny, as we have hinted, 

 evidently gets a little confused between his whales 

 and his orcce, and those other monsters who ' ran 

 at the whale as it were a foist or ship of warre, armed 

 with brazen pikes in the beak-head,' — evidently the 

 sword-fish. Ovid, too, had a slightly hazy but 

 decidedly bad opinion of the sword-fish, and represents 

 him as terrifying the tunnies to a great extent ; but 

 the passage is not very clear. It is, I think, doubtful 

 whether he intends us to believe that the sword- 

 fish spitted the tunny on the end of his beak, and 

 then waited for some external providence to take 

 it off for him before he could eat it, or otherwise 

 dispose of it. He could hardly have done it for 

 himself; but as I have cribbed both the Latin and 

 the translation, and have not the original by me, I 

 will leave that for others to decide. 



