"Merman Rosmer," which comes into English from a
Scandinavian source. The effect of his boarding a ship is identical
also. He would seem to have been a heavy fellow, North and South.

"Nor yet," says Pliny, still on the same subject, "is the figure
generally attributed to the Nereids [Mermaids] at all a fiction; only in
them the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still
rough all over with scales. For one of these creatures was seen upon the
same shores, [Ocean of Gades,] and as it died its plaintive murmurs were
heard, even by the inhabitants at a distance. The legates of Gaul, too,
wrote word to the late Emperor Augustus, that a considerable number of
Nereids had been found dead upon the sea-shore."

Entire faith in the scales is not exacted of the reader, and the weight
of authority, especially scientific, is against them. No marine mammals
have scales. There is, of course, no knowing what they may have had. The
statement of what the legates of Gaul wrote to the Emperor is of most
consequence in this extract, and it is perhaps out of a natural respect
for authority that we are inclined to give most weight to these official
communications. Officials, it is true, have sometimes erred; but these
officials agree with others, and to be stranded has been a common
misfortune of mermen and maids.

Alexander of Alexandria, the good Bishop who had so healthy an
abhorrence of Arianism, _saw_ (upon his own authority) a Nereid
(Mermaid) that had been thrown ashore on the coast of the Peloponnesus.
Seeing was believing; and if the Bishop was right in so many things, all
the way up to Divinity, is it possible that he could be wrong in the
mere fact of a dead animal? Or if he was wrong in this particular, is
not the whole question as to the right or wrong of Arianism opened
again?

A mermaid was stranded in 1403 near Haerlem,--driven ashore by a
tempest, said one Meyer, a Dutchman. It was brought to feed upon bread
and milk, taught to spin, and lived for many years. John Gerard of
Leyden adds, that she would frequently pull off her clothes and run
toward the water, and that her speech was so confused a noise as not to
be understood by anybody. She was buried in the churchyard, because she
had learned to make the sign of the cross. They had much consideration
for a possible soul in those days.

Gerard spoke this upon the credit of several persons who had seen her.
We find noted by another author, that, "in th