Sir Thomas Browne, in his merciless dissection of the vulgar beliefs of his day, writes, with his accustomed quaintness and equally accustomed sound common sense, “that all Animals of the Land are in their kinde in the Sea, although received as a Principle, is a tenet very questionable and that will admit of restraint. For some in the Sea are not to be matcht by any enquiry at Land and hold those shapes which terrestrious formes approach not, as may be observed in the Moonfish and the severall sorts of Raias, Torpedos, Oysters, and many more, and some there are in the Land which were never mentioned to be in Sea, as Panthers, Hyænas, Cammells, Molls, and others, which carry no name in Ichthology, nor are to be found in the exact descriptions of Rondoletius, Gesner, and Aldrovandus. Again, though many there be which make out their nominations, as the Sea-serpents and others, yet there are also very many that bear the names of Animalls at Land, which hold no resemblance in corporall configuration, wherein while some are called the Fox, the Dog, or Frog-fish, and are known by common names with those at Land, as their describers attest, they receive not these appellations from a totall similitude in figure, but any concurrence in common accidents, in colour, condition, or single conformation. As for Sea-Horses, which much confirm this assertion in their common descriptions, they are but Grotesco delineations which fill up empty spaces in Maps, and meer pictoriall inventions, not any Physicall shapes. That which the Ancients named Hippocampus is a little animall about six inches long, and not preferred beyond the classis of Insects. That they termed Hippopotamus, an amphibious animall about the River Nile, so little resembleth an horse that, except the feet, it better makes out a swine. Although it be not denied that some in the water doe carry a justifiable resemblance to some at Land, yet are the major part which bear their names unlike, nor doe they otherwise resemble the creatures on earth than they on earth the constellations which passe under Animall names in heaven: nor the Dogfish at Sea much more make out the Dog of the Land than that his cognominall or namesake in the heavens.” He then goes on to show that this belief restrains Omnipotence and abridges the variety of creation, making the creatures of one element but a counterpart of the other. [Illustration: FIG. 25.]