Word: dolphined
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...DOLPHIN by Robert Merle. 320 pages. Simon and Schuster. $5.95. Translated from the French by Helen Weaver...
...evidence given in the novel, this judgment of mankind is accurate. The book's human beings- except for a few dolphinlike characters necessary to the plot-are consistently sub-cetaceous in intelligence, honor, aquatic ability and sexual inventiveness. The dolphins are tiptop in every department, as Robert Merle, a French writer of some past distinction, is at pains to demonstrate, taking the departments one by one. In fact, in the very long sections of the book justly given over to praise for the dolphins' character and accomplishments, only two bits of dolphin lore escape specific mention. The first...
...what we perceive. What a man perceives is not what is there. His conceptualization of the world is not what it is, but merely what it seems to be. What it seems to be to us is no more real than the way the world appears to a dolphin, equipped with a weak eye, and a very acute sense of sound, perceiving shape and density...
...measure the extent and nature of that intelligence, Lilly established his unique Dolphin Point Laboratory in the Virgin Islands, and in this intriguing but eccentric book he describes how he has examined and trained dolphins, recorded and analyzed their voices, lived like them-and even with them. Lilly, a neurophysiologist who has also had training in physics and biophysics, has spent hours underwater in a darkened pool, attempting to understand the sensations experienced by dolphins. He believes that dolphins try to communicate with man by mimicking human voices and he has cooperated in experiments trying to teach dolphins to speak...
Margaret Howe, Lilly's attractive young researcher, actually lived with a dolphin named Peter in a flooded room for 21 months in an attempt to communicate more effectively. She found Peter to be very responsive. As a matter of fact, Peter exhibited considerable interest in effecting some kind of sexual breakthrough, indicating that Dr. Lilly may be a good deal nearer the truth about inter-species communication than even he suspected...