e ocean, an
atmosphere adapted to the breathing organs of beings resembling in form
the human race, endowed with surpassing beauty, with limited
supernatural powers, but liable to suffering, and even to death. Their
dwelling is in a vast region, situate far below the bottom of the sea,
which forms a canopy over them, like the sky over us, and there they
inhabit houses constructed of the pearly and coralline productions of
the ocean. Having lungs not adapted to a watery medium, but formed for
breathing atmospheric air, it would be impossible for them to pass
through the volume of waters that separates our world from theirs, if it
were not that they possess the power of entering the skin of some marine
animal, whose faculties they thus temporarily acquire, or of changing
their own form and structure so as to suit the altered condition through
which they are to travel. The most ordinary shape they assume is, as
everybody knows, that of man (that is, their own proper form) from the
waist upward, but below that of a fish. Whether they now breathe by
gills or lungs, the anatomists, it seems, have not yet determined; we
must presume the former alternative, since else it is not apparent what
they have gained by their piscine metamorphosis of tail; though where
the branchiae are situate we are a little at a loss to imagine. These,
however, are matters which doubtless the scientific world will one day
determine: it seems certain that they do thus acquire an amphibious
nature, so as not only to exist submerged in the waters, but to land on
the shores of our sunny world, where they frequently doff their fishy
half, resume their proper human form, and pass muster while they pursue
their investigations here.[90]

Unfortunately, but one of these resources can ever be availed of by any
individual mer-man or -maid, nor can any "son or daughter of the ocean
borrow more than one sea-dress of this kind for his own particular use;
therefore if the garb should be mislaid on the shores he never can
return to his submarine country and friends. A Shetlander, having once
found an empty seal-skin on the shore, took it home and kept it in his
possession. Soon after, he met the most lovely being who ever stepped on
the earth, wringing her hands with distress, and loudly lamenting, that,
having lost her sea-dress, she must remain for ever on the earth. The
Shetlander, having fallen in love at first sight, said not a syllable
about finding this preci