202 PLEASANT WA YS IN SCIENCE. 



deep sea which we are best acquainted with, are either those 

 which are at once very numerous and very useful as food or 

 in some other way, or else those which are very rapacious 

 and thus expose themselves, by their attacks on men, to 

 counter-attack and capture or destruction. In remote times, 

 when men were less able to traverse the wide seas, when, 

 on the one hand, attacks from great sea creatures were mere 

 apt to be successful, while, on the other, counter-attack was 

 much more dangerous, still less would be known about the 

 monsters of the deep. Seen only for a few moments as he 

 seized his prey, and then sinking back into the depths, a 

 sea monster would probably remain a mystery even to those 

 who had witnessed his attack, while their imperfect account 

 of what they had seen would be modified at each repetition 

 of the story, until there would remain little by which the 

 creature could be identified, even if at some subsequent 

 period its true nature were recognized. We can readily 

 understand, then, that among the fabulous creatures of 

 antiquity, even of those which represented actually existent 

 races incorrectly described, the most remarkable, and those 

 zoologically the least intelligible, would be the monsters of 

 the deep sea. We can also understand that even the 

 accounts which originally corresponded best with the truth 

 would have undergone modifications much more noteworthy 

 than those affecting descriptions of land animals or winged 

 creatures simply because there would be small chance of 

 any errors thus introduced being corrected by the study of 

 freshly discovered specimens. 



We may, perhaps, explain in this way the strange account 

 given by Berosus of the creature which came up from the 

 Red Sea, having the body of a fish but the front and head of 

 a man. We may well believe that this animal was no other 

 than a dugong, or halicore (a word signifying sea-maiden), 

 a creature inhabiting the Indian Ocean to this day, and which 

 might readily find its way into the Red Sea. But the account 

 of the creature has been strangely altered from the original 

 narrative, if at least the original narrative was correct For, 



