74 
MAMMALIA. 
sudden and unexpected meeting with tlie king of fish, who ranged 
himself on their side, not only as foretelling an approaching 
victory, but also as a certain omen that the queen would he 
happily delivered of a dauphin, which was true ; for four days 
afterwards the dauphin was born.” 
This dauphin, whose entrance into the world was so strangely 
announced, according to the saying of the sailors, during the 
preludes of a naval battle, was the future Louis XIY. 
The ancients have singularly loaded with fables the history of 
the Dolphin. According to them, it was a mild, familiar animal, 
sensible to music. It had assisted Neptune in finding his Amphi- 
trite. Philantes, after being shipwrecked on the coast of Italy, 
had been saved by a Dolphin. Arion, threatened with death by 
the sailors of the ship of which he was on board, having thrown 
himself into the sea, was picked up by a Dolphin, attracted by the 
sweet notes of his lyre, and conveyed safely into harbour on the 
animal’s back. Apollo took the form of a Dolphin when he con- 
ducted his colony to the Delphian shores. Neptune changed him- 
self into a Dolphin when he carried off Melanthus, &c. And so 
this marvellous creature was, among the ancients, the object of 
religious worship. Neptune was adored at Sunium, under the 
form of the Cetacean dear to his lover ; and the Delphian Apollo, 
honoured at Delphi, had Dolphins as his symbol. 
As the figures which adorned this temple dated from the most 
distant period, they were coarsely executed and inexact. When 
art had made some progress, the Grecian artists employed to 
reproduce these same images did not like to make any change in 
their drawings, which had been consecrated by tradition, and the 
iuLage of the Delphian Dolphins was perpetuated in painting and 
sculpture. It is for this reason that modern painters and sculptors 
represent the Dolphin still as did the Greek artists of the time of 
Homer — that is to say, with the tail elevated, the head large, the 
mouth enormous, &c. 
These fables, these admirations, these superstitions, inherited 
from antiquity, have been preserved in the different countries 
"which border on the Mediterranean Sea. Among many peoples the 
Dolphin has remained, as Lacepede tells us, a symbol of the sea. 
“ Twisted round a trident,” adds this naturalist, “ it represented 
the liberty of commerce ; placed round a tripod, it signified the 
