It was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere
about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning;
and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period,
dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books
you will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale,
where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold,
Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain.
In the title-page of the original edition of the "Advancement of Learning"
you will find some curious whales.
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there
are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages,
A.D. 1671, entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas
in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those
plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying
among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs.
In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing
the whale with perpendicular flukes.
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