Away he would go in a long,
long curve, and, meeting the ship in his flight, would rise in
the air, turn off at right angles to his former direction, and
spin away again, the whir of his wing-fins distinctly visible as
well as audible. At last he would incline to the water, but just
as he was about to enter it there would be an eddy--the enemy was
there waiting--and he would rise twenty, thirty feet, almost
perpendicularly, and dart away fully a hundred yards on a fresh
course before the drying of his wing membranes compelled him to
drop. In the face of such a sight as this, which is of everyday
occurrence in these latitudes, how trivial and misleading the
statements made by the natural history books seem.
They tell their readers that the EXOCETUS VOLITANS "does not fly;
does not flutter its wings; can only take a prolonged leap," and
so on. The misfortune attendant upon such books seems, to an
unlearned sailor like myself, to be that, although posing as
authorities, most of the authors are content to take their facts
not simply at second-hand, but even unto twenty-second-hand. So
the old fables get repeated, and brought up to date, and it is
nobody's business to take the trouble to correct them.
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