"_Halieus._--I have in life met with a few things which I found it impossible to explain, either by chance, coincidences, or by natural connexions; and I have known minds of a very superior class affected by them,--persons in the habit of reasoning deeply and profoundly. "_Physicus._--In my opinion, profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason; it is the pert, superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief. The deep philosopher sees chains of causes and effects so wonderfully and strangely linked together, that he is usually the last person to decide upon the impossibility of any two series of events being independent of each other; and in science, so many natural miracles, as it were, have been brought to light,--such as the fall of stones from meteors in the atmosphere, the disarming a thunder-cloud by a metallic point, the production of fire from ice by a metal white as silver, and referring certain laws of motion of the sea to the moon,--that the physical enquirer is seldom disposed to assert, confidently, on any abstruse subjects belonging to the order of natural things, and still less so on those relating to the more mysterious relations of moral events and intellectual natures." Old Isaac Walton has amused us with a variety of absurd fables and superstitions: the author of Salmonia, on the other hand, touches, as with the spear of Ithuriel, the monsters and prodigies of the older writers, and they at once assume the forms of well-ascertained animals, or vegetables. The _sea snake_ seen by American and Norwegian captains, appears as a company of porpoises, which in their gambols, by rising and sinking in lines, would give somewhat the appearance of the coils of a snake. The _Kraken_, or island fish, is reduced into an assemblage of _urticæ marinæ_, or sea blubbers. The _Mermaid_, into the long-haired seal;[113] and lastly, the celebrated Caithness Mermaid assumes the unpoetical form of a stout young traveller;--but this story is far too amusing to be dismissed with a passing notice. [113] A pretended Mermaid was exhibited some time since in London, said to have been caught in the Chinese seas. It was soon discovered to have been manufactured by joining together the head and bust of two different apes to the lower part of a kipper salmon, which had the fleshy fin, and all the distinct characters of the _Salmo Salar_.