In the account of the Creation the forming of the whale is specially dwelt upon: “And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind.” Luther, commenting on this, says that the creation of whales is specified by name, lest affrighted with their greatness we should believe them to be only visions or fancies. Though later commentators have decided that the leviathan of the Bible is the crocodile, it was long held to be the whale. Milton, in the first book of the “Paradise Lost,” writes of that sea beast— “Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream,” and the Jews had a legend that the first whales were so immense in bulk, so formidable in attack, so voracious, that there was considerable risk of their overtoppling the rest of creation; so while as yet there were but two of them in existence, one was destroyed in order that the race might not be continued and the general balance of Nature upset. Our ancestors found apt moral against the scornful in the reason assigned for the mouth of the flounder being on one side. It appears that at one time the flounder’s mouth was as fair to see as any other, but that it lost all its beauty through contemptuous flouting of the herring, and it has borne this evil mark of its jealousy ever since, and will probably so bear it to the end of time. At the vague date known as once upon a time we are told that all the fishes of the sea assembled to choose a king, and that the herring was elected to this dignified position. The flounder, on account of his red spots and other features that were evidently more appreciated by himself than by the main body of electors, had strong hope that he should himself be chosen, and the unlovely grimace with which he saluted his sovereign was, as a judgment upon him, made a fixture for all time as a punishment to himself and a warning to others. The tench was commonly called the physician, for it was believed by our forefathers that when the other fish were in any way hurt and required the aid of surgeon or physician, they healed themselves by rubbing against the tench, finding the slime of his body to be a “soveraigne salve” for their needs. For the sufferings of humanity the beasts, birds, and plants appear to have supplied a sufficient materia medica, and the less accessible creatures of the waters were but rarely pressed into the mediæval pharmacopœia. The blood of the eel was rubbed upon unwelcome warts, and a cruel remedy for bad eyes, the cruelty being, as we have seen over and over again in those old remedies, by no means an exceptional feature, was to capture a crab alive, cut out its eyes and then let it go.[135] The eyes were then bound upon the neck of the man, woman, or child, and a satisfactory result was speedily anticipated, though very possibly not so speedily forthcoming.