"In tlie passages where scales and feet are mention- ed as belonging lo the /««, commentators have shown that the crocodile is intended, which then is synonymous with the leviathan; and they have endeavored also to demonstrate, where tannin draw the dugs to suckle their young, that seals are meant, although cetacea nonrisli theirs in a similar manner. It may be doubt- ed whether in most of the cases the poetical diction points absolutelj' to any specitic animal, particularly as there is more force and grandeur in a generalized and collective image of the huge monsters of the deep, not inapjiropriately so called, than in the restriction to any one species, since all are in (Jen. i, 2r) made collect- ively subservient to the supremacy of man. But crit- icism is still more inappropriate when, not contented with pointing to some assumed species, it attempts to rationalize miraculous events by such arguments; as in the case of Jonah, where the fact of whales having a small gullet and not being found in the Mediterra- nean is adduced to prove that the huge fish 51, dag, was not a cetacean, but a shark! Now, if the text be literally taken, the transaction is plainly miraculous, and no longer within the sphere of zoological discus- sion; and if it be allegorical, as some, we think, erro- neously assume, then, whether the prophet was saved bv means of a kind of boat called d(((j, or it be a mys- tical account of initiation where the neo])hite was de- tained three days in an ark or boat figuratively denom- inated a fish, or Celtic avanc, the transaction is ecpially indeterminate; and it assuredly would be derogating from the high dignity of the prophet's mission to con- vert the event into a mere escape by boat or into a pa- gan legend such as Hercules, Bacchus, JemshSd, and other deified heroes of the remotest antiquity are fa- bled to have midergone, and which all the ancient mys- teries, including the Druidical, symbolized. It may be observed, besides, of cetaceous animals that, though less frequent in the jNIediterranean than in the ocean, they are far from being unknown there. Joppa, now Jaffa, the very place whence Jonah set sail, displayed for ages in one of its pagan temples huge bones of a species of whale, which the legends of the place pretended were those of the dragon monster slain by Perseus, as rep- resented in the Arkite mythus of that hero and An- dromeda, and which remained in that spot till the con- quering Romans carried them in triumph to the great city. Procopius mentions a huge sea-monster in the Propontis, taken during his prsefecture of Constantino- ple, in the 36th year of Justinian (A.D. 502), after hav- ing destroyed vessels at certain intervals for more than fift}' years. Rondoletius enumerates several whales stranded or taken on the coasts of the Mediterranean ; these were most likely all ureas, pliyseters, or campe- dolios, i. e. toothed whales, as large and more fierce than the mysticetes, which have balein in the mouth, and at present very rarely make their way farther south than the Bay of Biscay; though in early times it is probable they visited the Mediterranean, since they have been seen within the tropics. In the Syrian seas, the Belgian jiilgrim Lavaers, on his passage from Mal- ta to Palestine, incidentally mentions a ' Tonynvisch,' which he further denominates an 'oil-fish,' longer than the vessel, leisurely swimming along, and which the seamen said prognosticated bad weather. On the isl- and of Zerbi, close to tlie African coast, the late Com- mander Davies, R.N., found the bones of a cachalot on the beach. 8haw mentions an orca more than sixty feet in length stranded at Algiers; and the late Ad- miral Ross Donelly saw one in the Mediterranean near the island of Albaran. There are, besides, numerous sharks of the largest species in the seas of the Levant, and also in the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea, as well as cetacea, of which Balcena bitan is the largest in those seas, and two species of halicore or dugonr/, which are
WHALE
973
WIIATCOAT
herbivorous animals, intermediate between whales and seals" (Kitto).