“Looking far forth into the ocean wide, A goodly ship, with banners bravely dight, And flag in her top-gallant I espied, Through the main sea making her merry flight: Fair blew the wind into her bosom right, And th’ Heavens looked lovely all the while That she did seem to dance, as in delight, And at her own felicity did smile: All suddenly there clove unto her keel A little fish that we call remora, Which stopt her course, and held her by the heel, That wind nor tide could move her thence away.” We may indeed be thankful that this mysterious power, worse even than the more prosaic barnacles and other sea impedimenta that plague the modern shipowner by fouling the bottom of his good ship, and so retarding her course, seems to be no longer exercised. The merchantman speeding home with perishable cargo, the yachtsman burning to carry off the challenge cup, the great record-breaking Atlantic liner, carrying under heavy penalty for delay Her Majesty’s mails, would all be terribly hampered in their several ambitions in presence of so potent yet so apparently insignificant a foe. Well might Spenser add— “Strange thing meseemeth that so small a thing Should able be so great an one to wring.” One old writer feeling the impossibility of giving a satisfactory explanation of the marvel is content to say “of which there can be no more reason given than of the loadstone drawing iron; neither is it possible to shew the cause of all secrets in Nature,” a statement as true to-day as the day it was written, though this particular secret of Nature has in the interval been disestablished. That the dolphin was the swiftest of all living creatures, more rapid than a bird, swifter than an arrow shot from a bow, will probably be an entirely new idea to most of our readers, yet such was the ancient belief. The dolphin occurs very freely in blazonry, on ancient coinage, and in classic and renaissance decoration, and it is almost always represented either as “embowed,” that is to say, bent round like a bow, such being the significance of the heraldic term, or else it is introduced with its lithe body coiled gracefully round an anchor or trident. In either case the representation suggests an easy-going and leisurely state of affairs that is very different to the picture conjured up by the arrowy rush of the creature through the waves, as Pliny paints it for us.[134]