HBNSHAW.] MANATEE. 131 



external meatus." In the dried museum specimen this slit is wholly in- 

 visible, and even in the live or freshly killed animal it is by no means 

 readily apparent. Keen observer of natural objects, as savage and 

 barbaric man certainly is, it is going too far to suppose him capable of 

 representing an earless animal — earless at least so far as the purposes 

 of sculpture are concerned — with prominent ears. If, then, it can be 

 assumed that these sculptures are to be relied upon as in the slightest 

 degree imitative, it must be admitted that the presence of ears would 

 alone sufi&ce to show that they cannot have been intended to rejire- 

 sent the manatee. But the feet shown in each and all of them pre- 

 sent equally unquestionable evidence of their dissimilarity from the 

 manatee. This animal has instead of a short, stout fore leg, terminat- 

 ing in flexible fingers or paws, as indicated in the several sculptures, a 

 shapeless paddle-like flipper. The nails with which the flipper termi- 

 nates are very small, and if shown at all in carving, which is wholly 

 unlikely, as being too insignificant, they would be barely indicated and 

 would present a very different appearance from the distinctly mai-ked 

 digits common to the several sculi>tures. 



Noticing that one of the carvings has a differently shaped tail from 

 the others, the authors of the "Ancient Monuments" attem^Jt to reconcile 

 the discrepancy as follows : " Only one of the sculptures exhibits a flat 

 truncated tail ; the others are round. There is however a variety of the 

 lamantin {Manitus Senigalensis, Desm.) which has a round tail, and is 

 distinguished as the " round-tailed manitus." (Ancient Monuments, p. 

 252.) The suggestion thus thrown out means, if it means anything, 

 that the sculpture exhibiting a flat tail is the only one referable to the 

 manatee of Florida and southward, the M. Americanus, while those with 

 round tails are to be identified with the so-called " Kound-tailed Lamau. 

 tin," the M. Senegalensis, which dives in the rivers of Senegambia and 

 along the coast of Western Africa. It is to be regretted that the above 

 authors did not go further and explain the manner in which they sup- 

 pose the Mound-Builders became acquainted with an animal inhabiting 

 the West African coast. Elastic as has proved to be the thread upon 

 which hangs the migration theory, it would seem to be hardly capable 

 of bearing the strain required for it to reach from the Mississippi Val- 

 ley to Africa. 



Had the authors been better acquainted with the anatomy of the 

 manatees the above suggestion would never have been made, since the 

 tails of the two forms are, so far as known, almost exactly alike. A 

 rounded tail is, in fact, the first requisite of the genus Manatus, to which 

 both the manatees alluded to belong, in distinction from the forked tail 

 of the genus HaUcore. 



Whether the tails of the sculptured manatees be round or flat mat- 

 ters little, however, since they bear no resemblance to manatee tails, 

 either of the round or flat tailed varieties, or, for that matter, to tails of 

 any sort. In many of the animal carvings the head alone engaged the 



