THE SIRENS OF THE SEA. 621 



who takes the world exactly as he finds it ; and who, upon principle, 

 abstains at once from unfounded affirmations, unsupported judgments, 

 and unanswerable questions. His business, as he conceives it, is to 

 regulate his life, and help others to regulate their lives, by realities ; 

 and a thing to be a reality to him does not need to be a stone-wall. 



THE SIRENS OF THE SEA. 



Br W. H. LAEEABEE. 



THE sea is inhabited by three families of mammalian animals, 

 which, though they may be so "very like a whale" as to have 

 been sometimes spoken of together as cetaceans, are quite distinct in 

 their structure and habits, and show evidences of distinct origin. 

 They are the cetaceans, including the whales, dolphins, and porpoises ; 

 the pinnipeds, including the seals, sea-lions, and walruses ; and the 

 sirenians, including the manatees and dugongs. The affinities of the 

 cetaceans are not exactly known, but it is certain that they are crea- 

 tures of a very different sort from the animals of the other two classes ; 

 the pinnipeds are closely allied to the bears, dogs, and cats. Both 

 these classes are cai'nivorous. The sirenians are herbivorous pachy- 

 derms, whose nearest analogies must be sought among the hogs, tapirs, 

 and particularly in the hippopotamus. 



The manatee, or sea-cow, is the most widely diffused of the sire- 

 nians, and, being American, has the first claim to consideration. Its 

 various species are found along the coasts and in the rivers and inland 

 lakes of tropical America ; the length of the entire opposite coast 

 of Africa, around the Cape ; and as far north up the Mozambique 

 coast as the Zambesi River ; in the upper Niger River ; in Lake Tchad ; 

 in the East African Lake Shirwa ; and in the Tana Sea, in Abyssinia. 

 Agassiz has termed the animal the modern representative of the dino- 

 therium, and it is most probably the creature which Columbus mis- 

 took for a mermaid. It grows to be sometimes as long as seventeen 

 or twenty feet, but generally, not more than from eight to twelve feet, 

 and to weigh from one to three or four tons, having a body the 

 shape of an elongated barrel, slightly flattened above and below, with 

 two fore-limbs, but no sign of hinder extremities, and an horizontally 

 flattened or spatulate tail of about one fourth the extent of the body. 

 Its skin is much like that of the hippopotamus, and is very sparsely 

 covered with hair. Its fore-limbs are set far forward, are more free 

 in their motions than those of the cetaceans, and may be used as 

 claspers, flexed over the chest, for swimming or dragging the animal 

 along the bottoms, or up the banks of the rivers in which it feeds, and 

 to assist in the prehension of food. The finger-bones may be felt 



