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Chained to the stake there stood, not the fair woman I had seen there a moment before, but a hideous monster, a woman still, but a woman with three heads, and three bodies linked in one. Each of her long arms ended, not in a hand, but in a claw like that of a bird of rapine. Her hair resembled the locks of the classic Medusa, and her faces were inexpressibly loathsome.
If a 'Bipinnaria', a 'Brachialaria', a 'Pluteus', is competent to produce the Echinoderm, which is so widely different from it; if a hydroid polype can produce the higher Medusa; if the vermiform Trematode 'nurse' can develop within itself the very unlike 'Cercaria', it will not appear impossible that the egg, or ciliated embryo, of a sponge, for once, under special conditions, might become a hydroid polype, or the embryo of a Medusa, an Echinoderm."
When Buonarroti penned that sonnet in which he called the Pope his Medusa, he might well have been thinking of Leo, though the poem ought probably to be referred to the earlier pontificate of Julius. Certainly the Medici did more than the Delia Rovere to paralyse his power and turn the life within him into stone.
They were all fixed forever in the look and attitude of that moment! At the first glimpse of the terrible head of Medusa, they whitened into marble! And Perseus thrust the head back into his wallet and went to tell his dear mother that she need no longer be afraid of the wicked King Polydectes.
White as marble, and as terrible in expression as that of a Medusa, it had a paralysing effect on his nerves, and he shrank and trembled at her glance. "You refuse to obey me?" she repeated "Then if you do I destroy this air-ship and ourselves in less than two minutes! Choose! Obey, and live! disobey and die!"
"He passed on, for he had a kind word to say to many hundred poor fellows that day. When I got well I went home for a spell; but before long I heard that Lord Nelson had hoisted his flag as commander-in-chief of the channel squadron on hoard the `Medusa' frigate. I went on board, and the admiral instantly rated me as quartermaster.
None of these beings make much figure in mythology except Medusa, the Gorgon, whose story we shall next advert to.
Also many different sorts of medusa, particularly tubes of about 0.5 inches in length, with an apparatus shaped like a proboscis at one extremity of it. These I have not attempted to describe. In general the animals we caught this day differed altogether from those we had hitherto found during this voyage. Some few were the same, but the great majority were new.
It had a great many little feelers that hung down all around like so many mites of snakes, and so it was named Medusa, after that lady in the old times who wore snakes instead of hair, and who felt so badly because she couldn't do them up. Well, our little Medusa floated around and opened and shut her umbrella for a long time a month, or a year, perhaps we don't know how long.
But faces deceive, and the loveliness of youth is not like the loveliness of age an absolute mirror of the soul within. Was not Medusa captivating, for all her snaky locks? Hide those locks and one might have thought her a Daphne. What would relieve my doubts?
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