202 SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



credit. He sings thus of the triton, which he calls the sheep of the 

 sea: 



1 Dum vocale marts monstrum natst cequore triton 

 Neptuni pecus, in funes forte incidit extra 

 Demissos navim '/" 



which I venture to translate as follows : 



A triton, vocal monster of the deep, 

 One of a flock of Neptune's scaly sheep, 

 Was caught, as o'er the wat'ry plain he strayed, 

 By lines which fishers from their boat had laid. 



" Therefore," Lilian concludes, " if he, the omniscient god, pro- 

 nounces that there are tritons, it does not b ehove us to doubt their 

 existence." 



Sir J. Emmerson Tennent, in his 'Natural History of 

 Ceylon/ quoting from the Histoire de la Compagnie de 

 Jesus, mentions that the annalist of the exploits of the 

 Jesuits in India gravely records 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 in- 

 ternal structure found to be in all respects conformable to 

 the human." He also quotes Francois Valentijn, one of the 

 Dutch colonial chaplains, who, in his account of the 

 Natural History of Amboyna,* embodied in his great work 

 on the Netherlands' possessions in India, published in 1727,! 

 devoted the first section of his chapter on the fishes of that 

 island to a minute description of the " Zee-Menschen," 

 " Zee-Wyven," and mermaids, the existence of which he 

 warmly insists on as being beyond cavil. He relates that 

 in 1 65 3, when a lieutenant in the Dutch service was leading 

 a party of soldiers along the sea-shore in Amboyna, he and 



* One of the Dutch spice-islands in the Banda Sea, between Celebes 

 and Papua. 



t Beschrijving van Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien, etc., 5 vols. folio, 

 Dordrecht and Amsterdam, 1727, vol. iii. p. 330. 



