lastic as has proved to be the
thread upon which hangs the migration theory, it would seem to be hardly
capable of bearing the strain required for it to reach from the
Mississippi Valley to Africa.

Had the authors been better acquainted with the anatomy of the manatees
the above suggestion would never have been made, since the tails of the
two forms are, so far as known, almost exactly alike. A rounded tail is,
in fact, the first requisite of the genus _Manatus_, to which both the
manatees alluded to belong, in distinction from the forked tail of the
genus _Halicore_.

Whether the tails of the sculptured manatees be round or flat matters
little, however, since they bear no resemblance to manatee tails, either
of the round or flat tailed varieties, or, for that matter, to tails of
any sort. In many of the animal carvings the head alone engaged the
sculptor's attention, the body and members being omitted entirely, or
else roughly blocked out; as, for instance, in the case of the squirrel
given above, in which the hind parts are simply rounded off into
convenient shape, with no attempt at their delineation. Somewhat the
same method was evidently followed in the case of the supposed manatees,
only after the pipe cavities had been excavated the block was shaped off
in a manner best suited to serve the purpose of a handle. Without,
however, attempting to institute farther comparisons, two views of a
real manatee are here subjoined, which are fac-similes of Murie's
admirable photo-lithograph in Trans. London Zoological Society, vol. 8,
1872-'74. A very brief comparison of the supposed manatees, with a
modern artistic representation of that animal, will show the
irreconcilable differences between them better than any number of pages
of written criticism.

[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Manatee (_Manatus Americanus_, Cuv.).
Side view.]

[Illustration: Fig. 11.--Manatee (_Manatus Americanus_, Cuv.).
Front view.]

There would seem, then, to be no escape from the conclusion that the
animal sculptures which have passed current as manatees do not really
resemble that animal, which is so extraordinary in all its aspects and
so totally unlike any other of the animal creation as to render its
identification in case it had really served as a subject for sculpture,
easy and certain.

As the several sculptures bear a general likeness to each other and
resemble with considerable closeness the otter, the well known
fish-eating procliviti