ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, Limited INTERNATIONAL FISHERIES EXHIBITION AND 13 CHARING CROSS, S.W. 1883
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, Limited, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
PREFACE.
The little book 'Sea Monsters Unmasked,' recently issued as one of the Handbooks in connection with the Great International Fisheries Exhibition has met with so favourable a reception, that I have been honoured by the request to continue the subject, and to treat also of some of the Fables of the Sea, which once were universally believed, and even now are not utterly extinct.
The topic is not here exhausted. Other sea fables and fallacies might be mentioned and explained; but the amount of letter-press, and the number of illustrations that can be printed without loss for the small sum of one shilling—the price at which these Handbooks are uniformly published—is necessarily limited. I have, therefore, thought it better to endeavour to make each chapter as complete as possible than to crowd into the space allotted to me a greater variety of subjects less fully and carefully discussed.
I have the pleasure of acknowledging the kind assistance I have again received in the matter of illustrations. I gratefully appreciate Mr. Murray's permission to use the woodcut of Hercules slaying the Hydra, taken from Smith's 'Classical Dictionary,' and those of the golden ornaments found by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, and figured in the very interesting book in which his excavations there are described. I have also to thank the proprietors of the Illustrated London News, the Leisure Hour, and Land and Water, for the use of illustrations especially mentioned in the text.
HENRY LEE.
Savage Club;
Sept. 4th, 1883.