Dolphin
Dolphin names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Dolphin dol'fin, an open sea animal
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
dol'fin, an open sea animal. It is not a fish. It belongs to a family of land animals that have lived in the sea so long that they are not fit to be out of it. It is warm-blooded, it suckles its young, and breathes air. Both jaws are well filled with teeth. It feeds chiefly on fish. At times the dolphin annoys the herring fishers. It has many of the characteristics of the seal, but is more closely related to the whale, and still more so to the porpoise. There are many species--at least twelve in American waters. The common dolphin is an inhabitant of the Mediterranean and the temperate parts of the Atlantic. It is about six feet long, black above, and white beneath. It has a narrow nose and a long pair of jaws. Because of this the French call the dolphin goosebeak and goose of the sea. A single nostril is situated on the top of the head. The dolphins are noted for graceful movements. They travel in schools. When they see a ship a mile or two away they come racing through the waves as if glad to see someone. They gambol and dive about the ship as if to please the passengers with their graceful capers. In Greek mythology, the dolphin had the reputation of becoming familiarly attached to man. Apollo is represented as riding a dolphin and playing his flute. A thick body, tapering toward a fin-shaped tail, the suppression of the hind limbs and the reduction of the front limbs to fin-like flippers, as well as a fin-like appendage on the back, give all the members of the family the appearance of a fish. A large open sea fish of the tropics, remarkable for rapid changes of color when taken out of the water, has been confused with the dolphin. Byron has fallen into this error: Parting day Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues With a new color, as it gasps away, The last still loveliest, till 'tis gone--and all is gray. See Dauphin ; Aldus; Porpoise
Dolphin a cetaceous animal
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a cetaceous animal, forming the type of a family (Delphinidæ) which includes also the porpoises and narwhal. Dolphins are cosmopolite animals inhabiting every sea from the equator to the poles; they are gregarious, and swim with extraordinary velocity. The common dolphin measures from 6 to 10 feet in length, has a long sharp snout with numerous nearly conical teeth in both jaws; its flesh is coarse, rank, and disagreeable, but is used by the Laplanders as food. It lives on fish, mollusca, etc. The animal has to come to the surface at short intervals to breathe. The blow-hole is of a semilunar form, with a kind of a valvular apparatus, and opens on the vertex, nearly over the eyes. The structure of the ear renders the sense of hearing very acute. One or two young are produced by the female, who suckles and watches them The name is also comwith great care. monly but improperly given tasa fish, Coryphæna hippuris, a member of the mackerel family, the beauty of whose colors when dying has been much celebrated by poets. They abound within the tropics.
Dolphin BLACK, a species of Aphis
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
BLACK, a species of Aphis, or plant-louse, which infests the bean, and often does considerable injury flower-buds. It is of a dull black or darkgreen color, the young spotted with silvery white.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 guess that the dolphin "belongs to a family of land animals that have lived in the sea so long that they are not fit to be out of it" has been vindicated in detail: fossils such as Pakicetus and Ambulocetus, found in Pakistan from the 1980s onward, plus DNA work in the 1990s, place cetaceans within the even-toed ungulates, with hippos as their closest living relatives. What neither account could know is that dolphins navigate and hunt by echolocation, demonstrated experimentally in the 1950s, and communicate with signature whistles; since the 1960s they have been the focus of intensive research into animal cognition. Collier's 1921 confidence that they inhabit "every sea from the equator to the poles" now carries a caveat: the Yangtze river dolphin was declared probably extinct after a 2006 survey, and tuna-net bycatch killed millions of dolphins before "dolphin-safe" rules from the late 1980s. The "improperly" named dolphin fish, Coryphaena, is still with us, now sold in restaurants as mahi-mahi to avoid exactly the confusion Byron fell into.
Written for this edition, 2026.