So it is no fleet of graceful galleons--half bird, half lion, as the
_Griffin_ was--that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the
vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They
have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and
feathers, and now like a shoal of wet lions, tawny and black, their
powerful heads and long steel backs just visible above the blue water,
they course the western Mediterranean from spring to winter. [Footnote: It
is an intruding and probably whimsical, but fascinating, thought that the
wings of the griffin have become evolved into the air-ships which first
began successfully to fly, in America, near the shores of the lake on
which the Griffin itself was hatched. The Wright brothers were born near
one of those lakes. It is not a far-fetched or labored thought which
pictures that simple, rough-made galleon--very like the model of the ship
on the shield of Paris--as leading two broods across the valley above the
Falls, one of lions that cannot fly and one of sea-birds, hydroplanes,
whose paths are the air, but whose resting-places are the calm water; the
brood of the sea and the brood of the sky, hatched from one nest at the
water's edge.
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