Minotaur, the dog Cerberus, and others, it will be
unnecessary here to speak, since all are
acquainted with them ; but we should not be
discharging our task fitly, were we to omit
glancing at the fearful progeny of the sea,—
of the " great abyss of waters," which Milton
emphatically calls, " the monstrous world."
We have observed, at the commencement of
this paper, that many of the animals really
existing in the ocean, appear to our human
perceptions more like the result of some
accidental combination of matter than the
harmonious creations of an all-wise Providence.
There is something shudderingly horrible and
dreary in the aspect of (for instance) the sea-
devil, with its bat-like wings — the hippocampus,
half horsy and half serpentine — the
orbis, a mere lump of flesh joined to a tail
and fins— the toad-fish, with a face like a
shattered human visage occupying nearly the
whole body,— and many others. We fancy
that we can see in the eyes of some of these
bewildering shapes, a sense of the weight and
loneliness of the eternal waters. This, it is
true, is but the transference to them of our
own earthly sensations ; for the dwellers in
the deep are doubtless as happy in their
element as we are in ours. But we have no
means of sympathising with creatures whose
lives are so totally distinct from humanity ;
who seem to have no home, no abiding-place,
no nest, no haven for repose and love, nothing
beside the vastness, and the solitude, and the
weltering of the ancient sea.

Fantastic, however, as Nature herself has
been in this part of her domain, Superstition
has surpassed her. Poetry, also, has not
forgotten her divine mission to create.
Romance has been out upon the pathless waters,
and brought back news of its inhabitants,
mingling facts with fancies. And Investigation
itself, in its early days, has babbled to
the world of prodigies within the ocean
depths as strange and appalling as any within
the limits of acknowledged Fable.

We have already quoted a passage from
the Faery Queene, touching sea-monsters;
but the catalogue which the poet goes on to
give us, is so fearfully fine, and is such a
condensed cyclopædia of fabulous marine zoology,
that we cannot forbear appending it:—

Spring-headed hydres, and sea-shouldering whales;
Great whirlpools, which all fishes make to flee;
Bright scolopendraes, armd with silver scales;
Mighty monoceros, with immeasured tayles;

The dreadfull fish that hath deserved the name
Of Death, and like him lookes in dreadfull hew;
The griesly wasserman, that makes his game
The flying ships with swiftnes to pursew;
The horrible sea-satyre, that doth shew
His fearefull face in time of greatest storme ;
Huge ziffins, whom mariners eschew
No Iesse than rockes, as travellers informe;
And greedy rosmarines, with visages deforme.

All these, and thousand thousands many more,
And more deformed monsters thousand fold,
With dreadfull noise and hollow rombling rore
Came rushing, in the fomy waves enrold.
Book ii. c. 12.

What a passionate earnestness, as though
the writer had been really scared with his
own imagination, is there in the above
repetition of the word "thousand!"

Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsal, in
Sweden, who lived in the sixteenth century,
is one of the chief authorities in support of
the wild stories which were once in circulation
respecting sea-monsters. He tells us of
a species of fish seen on the coast of Norway,
whose eyes, which are eight or ten cubits in
circumference, appear, when glaring upward
from the black chasmy water-depths, like red
and fiery lamps; of the " whirlpool," or
prister, who is " two hundred cubits long, and
very cruel,"—who amuses himself by
upsetting ships, which he securely fastens by
entangling them in the windings of his long
tail, and who is most readily put to flight by
the sound of a trumpet of war, cannon-balls
being utterly ineffective; of a sea-serpent
(resembling that astounding phantom of the
deep of which we have heard so much lately)
who goes ashore on clear summer nights, to
regale himself on calves, lambs, and hogs,
and who " puts up his head like a pillar, and
catcheth away men" from off the decks of
ships; and of other marvels too numerous to
mention. But we are, even yet, so imperfectly
acquainted with the multiform vitality
of the ocean, that we must take care we are
not treading unawares upon the remote
twilight boundaries of fact. Are scientific
enquirers yet sure that those strangely vanishing
islands, which at times appear and disappear
in the solitary northern seas, are not the
prominent parts of some stupendous kraken?

Sindbad, in his First Voyage, beholds certain
"fishes about a cubit in length, that had
heads like owls; " and a commentator on the
Arabian Nights, says, that Martini (a
Jesuit of the seventeenth century, who
resided many years in China) " mentions fishes
with bird's faces in the China seas." In his
Third Voyage the Arabian Ulysses perceived
near one of the oriental islands, " a fish which
looked like a cow, and gave milk," and the
skin of which was "so hard that they usually
made bucklers of it." He also saw in the
same locality, a sea-monster " which had the
shape and colour of a camel." But these are
nothing in comparison with a fish seen by
our English mariner, Philip Quarll, off the
coast of his desert island. This phenomenon,
which, in its incongruous components, somewhat
resembles the mantichora, is described as
" a form without likeness, and yet comparable
to the most terrible part of every frightful
creature : a large head, resembling that of a
lion, bearing three pair of horns, one pair
upright like that of an antelope, another pair
like a wild goat's, two more bending
backwards ; its face armed all round with darts