while, on the other, counter-attack was much more dangerous, still less would be known about the monsters of the deep. Seen only for a few moments as he seized his prey, and then sinking back into the depths, a sea monster would probably remain a mystery even to those who had witnessed his attack, while their imperfect account of what they had seen would be modified at each repetition of the story, until there would remain little by which the creature could be identified, even if at some subsequent period its true nature were recognized. We can readily understand, then, that among the fabulous creatures of antiquity, even of those which represented actually existent races incorrectly described, the most remarkable, and those zoologically the least intelligible, would be the monsters of the deep sea. We can also understand that even the accounts which originally corresponded best with the truth would have undergone modifications much more noteworthy than those affecting descriptions of land animals or winged creatures—simply because there would be small chance of any errors thus introduced being corrected by the study of freshly discovered specimens. We may, perhaps, explain in this way the strange account given by Berosus of the creature which came up from the Red Sea, having the body of a fish but the front and head of a man. We may well believe that this animal was no other than a dugong, or halicore (a word signifying sea-maiden), a creature inhabiting the Indian Ocean to this day, and which might readily find its way into the Red Sea. But the account of the creature has been strangely altered from the original narrative, if at least the original narrative was correct. For, according to Berosus, the animal had two human feet which projected from each side of the tail; and, still stranger, it had a human voice and human language. “This strange monster sojourned among the rude people during the day, taking no food, but retiring to the sea again at night, and continued for some time teaching them the arts of civilized life.” A picture of this stranger is said to have been preserved at Babylon for many centuries. With a probable substratum of truth, the story in its latest form is as fabulous as Autolycus’s “ballad of a fish that appeared upon the coast, on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathoms above water, and sang a ballad against the hard hearts of maids.”