are rather
mer-swine than mer-maids; but there is something in the bluff round head
which may remind a startled observer of the human form divine. Sir
Emerson Tennent considers that this rude approach to the human outline,
and the attitude of the mother while suckling her young, pressing it to
her breast with one paw, while swimming with the other, the head of both
being held perpendicularly above water, and then, when disturbed,
suddenly diving and displaying her broad fin-like tail,--these, together
with her habitual demonstrations of strong maternal affection, may
probably have been the original from which the pictures of the mermaid
were portrayed, and thus that earliest invention of mythical physiology
may be traced to the Arab seamen and to the Greeks, who had watched the
movements of the Dugong in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

The early Portuguese settlers in India had no doubt that true mermen
were found in those seas; and the annalist of the exploits of the
Jesuits narrates that seven of these monsters, male and female, were
captured at Manaar in 1560, and carried to Goa, where they were
dissected by Demas Bosquez, physician to the Viceroy, and "their
internal structure found to be in all respects conformable to the
human." Making allowance for the very limited acquaintance which the
worthy physician was likely to have made with human anatomy by actual
autopsy, this statement goes for little:--the real resemblance, assuming
them to have been Dugongs, was about the same as that presented by the
hog, whose inwards are popularly believed by our own country people to
be in very close accordance with those of "Christians."

Sir E. Tennent has embellished his book with a very taking portrait of
the mermaid on the Dugong hypothesis; shewing two females, each holding
a baby [is it right to say _merbaby_?], emerging from the sea-wave; they
do look, to be sure, sufficiently human, but the well-known monogram of
our clever friend Wolf in the corner of the cut suggests shrewd doubts
that the portraits were not "_ad viv_."

It is, perhaps, among the Scandinavian races that the belief in the
merman has reached its culminating point. So many particulars are
inculcated concerning the mode and conditions of life of these submarine
beings, that the most intimate relations appear to have subsisted
between the terrestrial and the aquatic peoples. According to the creed
of the Norsemen, there exists, far beneath the depths of th