2^0 ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. Book 11. 



' ven great reafon to believe that there are, let them pleafe them- 

 ■* felvcs ; I fhall give myfelf no more trouble about them.' 



To thefe accounts of Mermaids given by Valcntyn may be added 

 what Bartholinus relates in his Centuria Hijioriarum Anatomic arumVa- 

 r'lonim, printed at Haphnia 1 654, p. 188. Where he informs us, ' That 

 ■' there w^as in his time one of thefe animals catchtd upon the coaft of 



* Brazil, and brought to Leyden, and there diffeced in prefence of 

 ' one whom he names, viz. Johannes de Layda, who made him a 

 ' prefent of a hand and a rib of the animal. He calls it a Syren, 

 ' and fays it was the form of a woman down to the waift, below 



* which it was nothing but a piece of unformed fleih, without any 



* marks of a tail. He gives us the figure of the whole animal, both 



* ereO: and fwlraming, as alfo of the hand which he got from 

 ' de Layda.' 



There is alfo, in a colledlon of certain learned trads, written by 

 John Gregory, A. M. and Chaplain of Chrift Church in Oxford, 

 publifhed at London in 1650, an account of a fea-animal of the 

 human form, very much like a bilhop in his pontificals. It is faid 

 to have been.fent to the King of' Poland in the 153 1, and to have 

 lived for fome time in the air ; but it took the firft opportunity of 

 throwing itfelf into the fea. This ftory Gregory fays he got from 

 one Rondeletius, whofe words he gives us, page 121. from which 

 it appears that Rondeletius had the itory only at fecond hand, from 

 one Gifbert, a German dodlor. 



But the moft circumftantial ftory of all is that which is told 

 by Maillet, in his Teliamede, (page 241. of the Englifli tranfla- 

 tion), of a Sea Man, that was feen by the whole crew of a French 



fliip, 



