Along the lines of animals that never were, I started thinking about there being a tree which grew out of the sea from the timber of wrecked ships that myths said produced geese.

There was also a frightful thing called the Chimera, an awful creature with three heads -- those of a lion, a goat, and a dragon.

I've previously mentioned the Harpies, but there were also stories of Sirens, which drew seamen to destruction.

Now, the Harpy, had a woman's face and body, but the talons of an eagle. Whereas, the Sirens of old time were supposed to have lovely voices, which drew navigators from their course at sea and lured them onto rocks, where their ships were wrecked and crews perished.

Homer tells us, in the Odyssey, that the wily Odysseus (or Ulysses) thought of a way to cheat the Sirens. He put wax in the ears of his sailors so that they rowed past the rocks of the Sirens without hearing the songs.

He had himself tied to a mast, for he wanted to listen, and listen he did as the boat went past the singing maidens.

He was charmed by their melodies and tried to hurl himself towards them, but he was tied fast to the mast, and the crew, having wax in their ears could not hear him order them to cut the cord that bound him.

We need not be surprised that the sea gave our ancestors good scope for nightmare stories in which they could all believe. Even today, the vast mysterious ocean has fascination and terror.

What secrets does it hold in its deep, cold caverns?

We all know the sea lion, which is simply a big seal. However, it used to be considered a monster of the deep, like a real lion, clad in mail. The idea must have come from some observer, noticing that this seal, when dry, shows a good mane, giving it a rather lion-like look.

Then somebody would argue from this description that the sea really had a lion, and would add the cost of mail as an ornament to his story.

We have also the sea elephant, a huge, funny-looking seal, with a snout something like a small elephant's trunk.

Long ago men wrote about a sea elephant, and drew pictures of it, making it appear that the animal had the head, trunk, tusks, and front legs of a land elephant, the hind quarters simply being the body of a fish.

The size and strength of the whale should be enough to satisfy anybody. Many whales are more than fifty feet long. Some are more than one hundred feet in length. However, this was not enough for our ancestors.

They described the whale as being about nine hundred and sixty feet long and four hundred and eighty feet broad. The teeth were said to be be twelve feet in length, and the eyes were so big that twenty men could sit in the space of one eye. Talk about fish stories!

The whale was also said to have two horns, or tubes, through which it sent great columns of water that would sink any ship. Then the whale was declared to rise above the clouds and, descending upon the ship, sink it. Waterspouts may have been the real basis for these ideas.

Further, its head was armed with a great number of prickly horns. We can see here, through the exaggeration, that someone had tried to describe a toothed whale, but the head had arisen from the plates of baleen in the mouth of the whalebone whale, which act as a sieve for straining food.

This monster was said to come up to the surface of the water, bearing quantities of sand upon its back. Sailors would approach in their ships, and mistaking it for an island, would cast anchor in its back, land, and make a fire on it too cook their meals. Then, the whale feeling the heat, would dart down into the sea, carrying men and ship to their doom.

There remains the Kraken to describe. Now the Kraken was the most terrible of sea beasts. There were supposed to be sea bishops and sea monks who did all sorts of alarming things for the terrifying of unhappy mariners, but the Kraken was the worst of all.

It was a creature whose back measured a mile and a half in circumference, so that, as it floated on the crest of the waves, sailors mistook it, as they mistook the whale, for an island.

However, the Kraken had arms like the tallest masts of ships, and with these it could seize the greatest vessel and pull it down beneath the waves. When the Kraken sank, it was supposed to create such a whirlpool that all ships near were sucked under, and the crews drowned.

It was a Norwegian who first spread the story of this monster. There can be no doubt he really did see a very large cuttlefish. Nobody knows how big the biggest of these really were back then, but we do know that its body is nothing like what the frightened man thought he saw, nor are its arms capable of upsetting a ship, even a small ship of those times.

The stories of the Kraken grew rapidly, but they became mixed up with stories of the sea serpent, of which most fanciful tales were told. Probably there were sea serpents once, and it is just possible that they yet exist in the great depths of the sea, but so far, no story about them has managed to stand unshaken.

Ribbon fishes have been mistaken for sea serpents, a line of whales or of dolphins with peculiarly shaped backs have had the same effect, and many other curious sights have misled men into telling the same old story.

Then there were the mermaids and mermen. Poets have helped to keep the belief alive. I was thinking about how Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson both wrote a lovely poems on the subject. No doubt wild imaginations of what mermen and mermaids were sprang forth from the active minds of both the writers and the listeners.

Now, mermaids were supposed to be beautiful women having the tail of a fish, and their mermen were the male mermaids and their lords and lovers -- were no doubt all only manatees and dugongs, or sea cows.

All the mermaids of our poems and stories are lovely in feature, but the animals who inspired them are rather hideous, and dull too.

They are about ten feet long, with curious fleshy muzzles ending in a sort of disc. The great virtue of the mother manatee or dugong, is her love for her little one. She tends it with all the care and affection possible.

When she feeds it, she raises herself in the water and clasps the little one to her, holding it with one flipper, while she swims with the other. Thus, at a distance a sailor might have imagined the pair to be a human mother and her small baby in the open water.

The legend of the streaming hair could scarcely come from the bristles with which her head and face surrounded. The manatees and dugongs live on seaweed, and no doubt observers thought that this seaweed were the mermaid's hair.

One kind of merman was called a sea bishop, because it was supposed to have a mitre-shaped head, resembling the hats of old days that bishops wore.

Many of the fabulous animals on land and sea have won a place in the literature of the human race. Remember, even Alice, in Wonderland, met a gryphon who danced. Alice never did feel entirely at ease with him, yet he was a harmless, awkward fellow.

From the depths of man's imagination and perhaps in trying to explain what he did not understand or that which frightened him -- come the many animals who never were. The mermaids and dragons used to be favorite subjects for poets and authors as I've already pointed out. Artists loved to paint unicorns. European map makers of the old days used to decorate their charts with such fanciful beasts.

Today, our children might ride on the Kraken at Sea World, completely unaware that this high thrill scary roller-coaster ride, perpetuates the myth of ancient stories about things that make grown-ups scream with its very name.

I'm not so sure what this says about how much we've evolved except that some of us stilll like the excitement and adventure of a good scare every now and then.