Lore of the Unicorn, by Odell Shepard, , at sacred-texts.com THE
zoologists of four hundred years ago believed that every
terrestrial form of animal life had a marine counterpart. When
men began to think, in the seventeenth century, that the land-
surface of the globe had been fully explored and yet no unicorn
was any where discovered, it was natural, therefore, that they
should seek the animal beneath the ocean waves. They were
justified by at least a partial success: the alicorn, whose
origin had been concealed so long by the mists and dangers of
the northern seas and by that old fear of the Atlantic
sedulously propagated two thousand years before by Phoenician
merchants, was traced at length to its source. The method of
this discovery and the effects of it upon commerce and medicine
and scholarship, the coincidence of it with the dawn of
modernity, the light it threw backward over the way we have
comethese things, which make up perhaps the most interesting
department of unicorn lore, are what we have left t