p. 12.

[74] Seemann's _Isthmus of Panama_.

[75] I am indebted for this note to the Rev. Leonard Jenyns. See his
edition of White's _Selborne_, (1843) p. 66.

[76] _Zoologist_, pp. 6541, 6564.

[77] _Ceylon_, i. 211.

[78] _Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal_, vi. 465.

[79] _Brit. Fishes_, i. xxvii. Aristotle had long before given the same
explanation.

[80] _De Pisc. in siceo degent._

[81] _De Piscibus._

[82] _Siam_, i. 144.

[83] _Emb. to Siam_, i. 10.

[84] _Fishes of Guiana_, i. 113.

[85] _Annals N. H._, _May 1853_.

[86] Tennent's _Ceylon_, ii. 498.

III.

MERMAIDS.

According to Berosus there came up from the Red Sea, on the shore
contiguous to Babylonia, a brute creature named Oannes, which had the
body of a fish, above whose front parts rose the head of a man; it had
two human feet, which projected from each side of the tail; it had also
a human voice and human language. This strange monster sojourned among
the rude people during the day, taking no food, but retiring to the sea
again at night; and continued for some time, teaching them the arts of
civilised life. Other ancient authors, as Polyhistor and Apollodorus,
allude to the same tradition; and we gather that the portrait of the
learned stranger (not painted _from the life_, we may presume,
considering the condition of the people when he appeared, unless we may
suppose it to have been the effort of one of his pupils in the pictorial
art under his instruction) was preserved at Babylon to the historic
period.

In an elaborate sculpture of the later Assyrian period, discovered by M.
Botta at Khorsabad, a maritime expedition is portrayed, and the sea
around the ships is filled with various marine animals, and among them
the compound mythic forms of winged bulls and bull-lions, in which the
Assyrians delighted, together with a figure composed of the body and
tail of a fish extended horizontally, and the perpendicular trunk and
foreparts of a man, crowned with the sacred cap, possibly representing
the traditional Oannes.

The god Dagon of the Philistines, and the goddess Atergatis of the
Syrians were worshipped under the same combination of the human and
piscine forms, and the Tritons of classical mythology perpetuated the
idea.

It is curious that in almost all ages and in almost all countries there
should have prevailed a belief in the actual living existence of
creatures like this. Was the mythological symbol the origin of the