(called from its hands,) and of the Halicore, or Dugong,
"from its mammae, called the Mermaid." Concerning this latter Hartwig has
the following sentence:--"When they raise themselves with the front part
of their body out of the water, a lively fancy might easily be led to
imagine that a human shape, though certainly none of the most beautiful,
was surging from the deep."

This is the testimony, and our deduction is short and simple.

We see, first, in the East, two hieroglyphs: one, the fishy man-monster,
expressive of a joint dominion over land and sea; the other, a woman and
fish conjoined, and expressive of relationship between the moon and the
sea; and thus _form_ of the Mermaid grew; and as that which had in its
mythology the latter of the figures was a maritime nation, the figure
was spread abroad and perpetuated. Next, in the North we see the
imagination that placed a colony of trolls under every hill, a tiny
creature under every "cowslip's bell," and a separate spirit in every
little stream, peopling also the outer ocean with its creatures; and
here the perfect _idea_ of the Mermaid, with its various beneficent or
mischievous qualities, appears.

Between these two put the sailor, always superstitious and of ready
credulity, and very often ignorant that the stories and the figure were
not the actual results of human experience, and, their reality assumed,
whatever strange thing he saw in his wanderings would be naturally
referred to them, whether it were an occasional Dugong, or only a seal
erected in the water at such a distance that the sunbeams on his shining
coat made it seem white.

And this is the natural history of the Mermaid.

Aside from this, if one were Quixotically inclined to assert the
Mermaid, he would find in all that has been said nothing of weight
against it; and after what has been proved to have existed, it is hard
to say what is impossible. The Ichthyophagi of Diodorus, while they
retained their human form, were more than half-fish, fishes in blood and
instinct very clearly. Tendencies exaggerate themselves very strangely
in a few centuries. A negro's under-lip has been so big as to hang down
before him like an apron. Cuvier declares that we "may trace the
gradations of one and the same plan, from man to the last of the
fishes"; and Mr. Darwin's theory appears to involve something like
Mermaids as inevitable links, existing or extinct, in the chain of
universal life.

FOOTNOTES:

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