Indeed there are unlimited instances: the people of Amphilocus and Taranto tell the same stories about boys and dolphins; and these make it credible that also the skilled harper Arion, when at sea the sailors were getting ready to kill him with the intention of stealing the money he had made, succeeded in coaxing them to let him first play a turn on his harp, and the music attracted a school of dolphins, whereupon he dived into the sea and was taken up by one of them and carried ashore at Cape Matapan.” A very similar but apparently quite independent account of these stories is given by the younger Pliny, in his _Letters_ (IX, 23). The elder Pliny then goes on to tell of the manner in which dolphins assist fishermen, which corresponds closely with the accounts given by recent observers of this cooperative activity between fishermen and dolphins. (For accounts of these see Antony Alpers, _Dolphins_, 146 sq.) There are numerous other stories similar to those given by the Plinys from classical antiquity, but it is quite impossible to recount them here.[1] What they all have in common is the friendliness of the dolphin for human beings, their rescue of them when they were thrown into the sea, their playfulness, especially with children, and their interest in almost any sort of sound. All these traits came to be regarded as mythical by later and more sophisticated ages, and Usener (_Die Sintfluthsagen_) comments on the effect that the prevalence of these tales had even upon the scientific thought of antiquity, making it difficult for such thinkers as Aristotle to get away from the belief in the dolphin’s ability to carry a rider, and in its capacity for human feeling (Aristotle, _History of Animals_, 631a). But Aristotle was right and Herr Usener wrong. The delightful thing about most of these myths is that they all appear to be based on solid fact, and not on the fancies attributed to the original narrators. Another typical modern gloss by a highly sophisticated writer, biologically not unknowledgeable, Norman Douglas, is the following: Commenting on the delphic mythology, he writes, “From these and many other sources, we may gather that there was supposed to exist an obscure but powerful bond of affection between this animal and humanity, and that it was endowed with a certain kindheartedness and man-loving propensity. This is obviously not the case; the dolphin cares no more about us than cares the haddock. What is the origin of this belief? I conjecture that the beast was credited with these social sentiments out of what may be called poetic reciprocation. Mankind, loving the merry gambols and other endearing characteristics of the dolphin, which has a playful trick of escorting vessels for its own amusement, whose presence signified fair weather, and whose parental attachment to its offspring won their esteem—quite apart from its fabled, perhaps real, love of music or at least of noisy sounds—were