Page:Under the Sun.djvu/290

266 snout is constantly twitching like a rabbit’s, but the gesture that seems so appropriate in the nervous, vigilant little rodent is immeasurably ludicrous in this huge monstrosity. The eyes, again, now contracted to a pin’s point, now expanded full to gaze at you with expressionless pupils, seem to move by a mechanism beyond the creature’s control. Voiceless and limbless, the bulky cetacean sways to and fro, the very embodiment of stupid, feeble helplessness, a thing for shrimps to mock at and limpets to grow upon.

A carcass of such proportions, such an appalling contour, should, to satisfy æsthetic requirements, possess some stupendous villany of character, should conceal under such an inert mass of flesh some hideous criminal instinct. Yet this great shapeless being, this numskull of the deep sea, is the most innocent of created things. It lives on lettuce. In its wild state it browses along the meadows of the ocean bed, cropping the seaweeds just as kine graze upon the pastures of earth, inoffensive and sociable, rallying as cattle do for mutual defence against a common danger, placing the calves in the middle, while the bulls range themselves on the threatened quarter. These are the herds which the poets make Proteus and the sea-gods tend, the harmless beeves with whom the sad Parthenope shared her sorrows! These are the actual realities that have given rise to so many a pretty fiction, the dull chrysalids from which have swarmed so many butterflies.

It is disappointing to those who cherish old-world fancies; but to Science the lazy, uncouth manatee is a precious thing. Science, indeed, has seldom had a more pleasing labor than the examination and identiflcation of this animal; for, though so ludicrously simple in