Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/710

692 the cultivated classes. The Byzantines had so little regard for them that they caught them and salted them. It was not thought amiss to make them of use in medicine according to the presumed laws of sympathy and homœopathy. The fat of the dolphin, eaten with wine, would cure hydrocephalus; its teeth would ease the teething of children, if the proper bones were rubbed upon the gums or burned to ashes and taken; and they served as amulets to protect against sudden dangers. To dream of this wonderful animal signified good, while the dreaming of any other creature of the water betokened evil.

Such representations by the ancients were the more singular, because the dolphin in reality is so strikingly different from them. According to science, the dolphin is the boldest, most greedy, and fiercest robber of the sea, the terror of the smaller fish, especially of the flying-fish, which leaps into the air in fear of it. How was it possible, in the face of qualities so directly opposite, for the dolphin to be made the pet of poetic and figurative art among a people who were otherwise so keen in their perceptions? The question may be answered, generally, by considering the two fundamentally different points of view from which the ancients and the moderns regarded the animal world. The Greeks, and still more the people of the middle ages, were generally inclined to put the realistic and scientific side in the background, and to look at animals from the religious, moral, and sentimental point; the humoristic-satirical character of the romantic and Germanic animal-poetry of the middle ages is a departure in another direction. It would, however be a mistake, and would underrate the clear comprehension of reality possessed by the Greeks, to suppose that all these traits of dolphin-life were mere fancy-pictures. The dolphin was observed correctly on the whole, but the lively imaginative faculty of the sailors and fishermen, easily moved to exaggeration in contemplating the immensity of the sea, unconsciously underlaid the natural behavior of these animals with moral motives. With later peoples, those traits were exaggerated on the sentimental side. Large schools of dolphins followed the sailors in clear weather and amused and entertained them with their arrow-like movements, and with the gracefully waving lines which they left on the waters, while everything else avoided the ship. It was easy for them to imagine that all this was done for their sake, and in consequence of the dependence of the animal upon man. The fancy naturally arose that the dolphin by his movements warned men of approaching storms; and it became regarded as a power and a symbol of the sea and sacred to Neptune. As the lion was king of the animals of the land, so was the dolphin king of the animals of the sea; and as the former, according to the story, ate apes to renew his strength in his old age, so did the dolphin prolong his life to three hundred years by eating sea-apes. Thus a humanizing of Nature took place in this fancy of the Greeks, as in everything else they looked at. It was imagined that the dolphin could call with a whistle, and when