WHALES AND MERMAIDS 313 



found in the Museum of St. Petersburg a horny plate 

 which exactly resembled that which had been figured 

 by Steller (and it was the only thing he had figured) in 

 his account of the animal. The discovery of this plate 

 thus served to prove both the truth of Steller's narrative 

 and the animal's, previously unknown, nature. Afterward 

 an imperfect skull was found at Behring Island, then 

 three nearly complete skeletons w^ere discovered, and 

 recently yet other bones have been extracted from the 

 frozen soil. 



In form it resembled the dugong and manatee, but its 

 head was relatively smaller and it had no teeth whatever, 

 only a horny plate in each jaw. It had a thick, rugged, 

 naked skin, though there were brush-like hairs on the 

 paddles. It was of a dark brown colour, sometimes 

 spotted 01' streaked with w^hite. 



The extinction of this animal may remind our readers 

 of what was said in our notice of the turkey about the 

 extirpation of the dodo. That bird had, like the rhytina, 

 no means of escape or defence, was good for eating, and 

 entirely confined to a minute and remote part of the 

 earth's surface. 



But how came the rhytina to dwell in such a tiny, out- 

 of-the-way spot, and where did mermaids come from, and 

 what may have been their ancestors ? That their ances- 

 tors were quadrupeds and were once widely distributed 

 over the earth's surface there can be no doubt. In the 

 middle and later tertiary times mermaids of different 

 kinds abounded in the European seas and swam about 

 on the English coast where now is Suffolk. They were 

 more or less like the dugong, but, though some of them 

 were larger, their tusks were smaller. Their typical form 

 has been named Halitherium, and the most remarkable 

 thing about it is the fact that it had a pair of small 



