The sea-horse according to some authorities is found floating on the ice between Britain and Norway, and is taken by the whalers for the oil he contains. He is described as having a head like a horse, and as sometimes neighing, but his hoofs are said to be cloven like those of a cow, while his hinder parts are those of a fish. This creature would appear to be now quite lost to science. The sea-horse naturally suggests the idea of the sea-unicorn, depicted as of equine form, but having the hinder parts piscine in character. The horn of the sea-unicorn occasionally brought home by merchants and mariners was probably the “sword” of the swordfish or the tusk of the narwhal, as it is often mentioned that it was able to penetrate the ribs of ships, and later experience has proved that an encounter between swordfish or narwhal and ships has occasionally taken place. The tusk of the narwhal is a spiral tapering rod of ivory, sometimes attaining to the length of eight or ten feet. Purchas mentions a horn of a sea-unicorn that was presented by Frobisher to his sovereign, and preserved at Windsor, and the name of this great arctic voyager naturally suggests that this horn was the tusk of a narwhal, a creature of the northern seas. One old writer speaks of the horn as a “wreathy spire,” a description which admirably accords with the narwhal tusk. The fact once established that there were creatures in the sea with horns like unicorns, it was at once assumed that they had the horse-like form assigned to the land-unicorn, and in some of the old authors the sea-unicorn is represented as of purely equine form, plus the horn.[132] In a book published in 1639, entitled “A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse,” we find this question asked, “Whether doth a dead body in a shippe cause the shippe to sail slower, and if it doe, what is thought to be the reason thereof?” The answer to the query is that “the shippe is as insensible of the living as the dead, and as the living make it goe the faster, so the dead make it not goe the slower; for the dead are no Rhemoras to alter the course of her passage, though some there be that thinke so, and that by a kind of mournful sympathy.”[133] The potent influence of the remora or sucking-fish to arrest the progress of a ship by merely adhering to its keel is a curious fancy that has been handed on for centuries. Pliny and many other ancient writers had full belief in this foe to the mariner, and references to it in much more recent authors are by no means uncommon. Thus Ben Jonson alludes to it in the lines— “I say a remora, For it will stay a ship that’s under sail.” While Spenser in his “Visions of the World’s Vanity,” writes—