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Updated: August 9, 2024
As they reached the foot of the grey cliffs, the Crab-boy unfolded a pair of fin-like wings from his elbows, and began to swim upwards leaving the little Princess with her arms stretched out imploringly towards him. "Oh, don't leave me here by myself!" she cried. "I shall never find my way to the Sea-grandmother!"
But it was a strange, monstrous thing he saw. From her gleaming neck down to the ground was dank, shapeless form. So a walrus or huge seal might appear, could it totter about erect upon low, fin-like feet. There was no grace of shape, no tapering tail, no shiny scales, only an appearance of horrid quivering on the skin, that here and there seemed glossy in the moonlight.
Driven desperately by a squally and uncertain southeast wind, with a welter of short waves knocking his boat's head about in the most incalculable way, he had succeeded in upsetting her about six yards from the shore of an island on to the point of which she was certain to drift, with no more than four feet of water under her at the critical moment The Tortoise, having no ballast in her and depending entirely for stability on her fin-like centreboard was not, as Peter Walsh knew very well, in the smallest danger of sinking.
The resemblance, in the shape of the body and in the fin-like anterior limbs, between the dugong, which is a pachydermatous animal, and the whale, and between both these mammals and fishes, is analogical. Amongst insects there are innumerable instances: thus Linnæus, misled by external appearances, actually classed an homopterous insect as a moth.
During these excursions, we might suppose some varieties, which had the skin of the webbed intervals of their toes less developed, to succeed best in walking on the land, and in the course of several generations they might exchange their present gait or manner of shuffling along and jumping by aid of the tail and their fin-like extremities, for feet better adapted for running.
Slowly they rose, one after the other, and waddled to the water, all but one, the most gallant or most gorged of the party. He lay still until I was within a hundred yards of him; then slowly rising on his fin-like legs, he lumbered towards the river, looking askance at me, with an expression of countenance that seemed to say, "He can do me no harm; however, I may as well have a swim."
This marvelous story acquires additional interest, when we consider the characteristic peculiarities of the genus Chironectes. As its name indicates, it has fin-like hands; that is to say, the pectoral fins are supported by a kind of long wrist-like appendage, and the rays of the ventrals are not unlike rude fingers.
One of the great eyes seemed turned to him with a peculiar glare, while as he fixed his own upon it as if unable to resist the attraction, he made out that from behind the curve the elongated body of the creature rose just above the surface, carrying out the semblance on a great scale to some swan-like half-fishy creature, and then with a quick rush as if the water were being hurled from it by enormously powerful fin-like paddles, the strange fish, reptile, or whatever it was, had passed on into the hazy moonlit night and was gone.
A speck that grew larger, with twinkling, fin-like flashes along each side, and in due time it proved to be a galley like their own bearing down straight for them. Nobody stopped to ask any questions. That was not sea-style then.
It was a common remark with her, and it probably meant either approbation or disapprobation if it did not mean simple discretion. THERE had been a babe with no arms born in one of the western counties of Massachusetts. In place of upper limbs the child had growing from its chest a pair of fin-like hands, mere bits of skin-covered bone. Furthermore, it had only one eye.
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