14 MARINE AND AQUATIC TRESPASSERS. 



this is by far the largest, the generality seldom exceed- 

 ing eighteen inches in length. 



Yet, utterly absurd as they are, there are many 

 persons who firmly believe in them. I once had a 

 narrow escape from a personal assault at the hands of 

 an owner of a Japanese mermaid. I saw it in his 

 shop a fishmonger's; stepped in to look at it, and 

 made some remarks upon the ingenuity with which 

 wire had been made to imitate ribs and other bones. 

 I thought that I was paying a compliment, but very 

 soon found that the sooner I was out of the shop the 

 better it would be. I have even seen one of these 

 objects in which the artist had been audacious enough 

 to fasten a great pair of bat-like wings to the 

 shoulders. * 



The origin of the mermaid is utterly obscure, and 

 is lost in the mists of antiquity. Horace, in his " Ars 

 Poetica," treats the popular idea of the mermaid as 

 represented by modern artists 



"Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne;" 

 which may be translated 



"A lovely woman with a fish's tail." 



But the idea is far older than Horace. We find it 

 in Dagon, the Fish God of the Philistines a deity 

 who is even at the present time worshipped in the same 

 shape throughout Burmah, and whose gigantic images 

 stand, all glittering with their golden scales, in the 

 Burmese temples, exactly as they did in the time 

 when Dagon fell prostrate before the Ark in Philistia. 



*We see the same idea of the union of the man and 

 the fish in the ancient Assyrian sculptures. This idea 



