OF THE UNITED STATES 393 



wounded or in distress, all contributed to accelerate its final ex- 

 tinction." 



Professor Nordenskjold has claimed and in the writer's opin- 

 ion upon too insufficient evidence, that living specimens of this 

 sirenian were known to exist in the locality above referred to as 

 late as the year 1854. This matter has been more carefully exam- 

 ined into by Dr. Stejneger, who it would seem has very success- 

 fully refuted this erroneous notion. 



We now pass to the existing types of these interesting animals, 

 and find that there are but two genera of them, viz.: Halicore 

 and Manatus (or Trichechus of other authors, and as given above), 

 the first contains the famous Dugongs, sirenians very distinct in 

 their structure from our Manatees, but as they are denizens of 

 "the shallow bays and creeks of the Ked Sea, east coast of Africa, 

 Ceylon, islands of the bay of Bengal and the Indo-Malayan Archi- 

 pelago, ranging from Barrow Reefs on the west to Moreton Bay 

 on the east/' they cannot roperly claim our time and space here, 

 as interesting as they are in many particulars. Even our own 

 Manatee has a closely related African cousin (M. senegalensis), 

 and of which form I have given a view of the skull in the present 

 chapter (Fig. 102), as I had not one of the American ones at my 

 hand. 



There are two species of American Manatees, but only one of 

 these belong to our United States fauna, the Florida manatee, a 

 form that, so far as this country is concerned, is now confined 

 to the coasts of the peninsula from which it takes its name. Ow- 

 ing to the fact that most of the specimens of Manatees that have 

 reached Europe are the South American animals, and further, 

 as it was very natural that they should figure that form in the 

 " Transactions," this will account for my presenting here a group 

 of those animals in lieu of our own species; however, when re- 

 duced to this small size they are hardly distinguishable in the 

 drawing which illustrates the present chapter. 



Manatees are enabled to use the paddles formed by their 

 forearms with considerable facility, and this is undoubtedly the 

 way in which they originally came by their name, it being derived 

 from the Latin word for hand. Manatus, moreover, is the tech- 

 nical name applied by some zoologists to the genus that has been 

 created to contain them. According to True, Mr. W. A. Conklin, 

 director of the Central Park menagerie, in New York city, gives 

 the following dimensions of a specimen kept alive in that estab- 



