persuasion? Or is there any marine animal uniting so much of the general
form of the fish with that of man as to have given the conception of the
idol? A naturalist of deserved eminence has maintained, on purely
scientific grounds, that such an animal must exist,--that the laws of
nature absolutely require such a being; and though the amount of force
which his reasoning, possesses will be estimated differently according
as we reject or accept the hypothesis of the circularity of the great
plan of nature, we may as well see what he has to say for a marine
primate,--be he man or ape, mermaid or mermonkey.

"There is yet," says Mr Swainson, "another primary type necessary to
complete the circle of the quadrumanous animals, and it is that which we
have elsewhere distinguished as the natatorial; but of such an animal we
have only vague and indefinite accounts. It will be seen that,
throughout the whole class of quadrupeds, the aquatic types are
remarkably few, and in general scarce; and that they contain fewer forms
or examples than any other, and are often, in the smaller groups,
entirely wanting. To account for this is altogether impossible; we can
only call attention to the fact, as exemplified in the aquatic order of
_Cetacea_, in that of the _Ferae_, in the _Pachydermata_, in the circle
of the _Glires_, and in all the remaining natatorial types of the
different circles of quadrupeds. We do not implicitly believe in the
existence of mermaids as described and depicted by the old writers--with
a comb in the one hand and a mirror in the other; but it is difficult to
imagine that the numerous records of singular marine animals, unlike any
of those well known, have their origin in fraud or gross ignorance. Many
of these narratives are given by eye-witnesses of the facts they vouch
for--men of honesty and probity, having no object to gain by deception,
and whose accounts have been confirmed by other witnesses equally
trustworthy. Can it be supposed that the unfathomable depths of ocean
are without their _peculiar_ inhabitants, whose habits and economy
rarely, if ever, bring them to the surface of the watery element? As
reasonably might a Swiss mountaineer disbelieve in the existence of an
ostrich, because it cannot inhabit his Alpine precipices, as that we
should doubt that the rocks and caverns of the ocean are without animals
destined to live in such situations, and such only. The natatorial type
of the _Quadrumana_, however,