294 The Sirenia, ” [May, 
The manatee rarely attains a length of more than eight to ten 
feet. The tail, like that of the dugong, is horizontally placed, but 
differs from that species in being evenly rounded on the end; the 
fore extremities are short and weak ; the fingers are“énclosed to- 
gether in one fold of integument and bear faint vestiges of nails; 
the skin is thick and very tough and of a lead or slate color. 
There are no incisor or canine teeth in the adult, and the molars 
are thirty-eight in number,—twenty in the upper and eighteen in 
the lower jaw. These are not all present, however, at any one 
time, as they successively come out, fill their purpose and are suc- 
ceeded by others in turn. The bones of all the Sirenians are 
massive and heavy ; the animals, therefore, possess little buoyancy 
in their native element and are not much disposed to rapid mo- 
tion. ; 
The main points of difference between M. australis and M. sene- 
galensis, according to Prof. Owen, are in the larger skull of the 
former and in the conformation of the malar bone and of the 
mandible or lower jaw. M. latirostris is said to resemble the 
African form more closely than it does its nearer neighbor on the 
American coast. 
Several efforts have been made to keep the manatee alive in 
confinement, but without much success. One of the most satis- 
factory attempts was made in the summer of 1876, by the Zoolog- 
ical Society of Philadelphia, and as the habits of the animal are 
not very widely known, a few words descriptive of the manner in 
which this specimen passed its time may not be uninteresting. 
The animal was a female, not fully adult, about six feet long, 
and was captured in the Orinoko river. She was put in a tank 
containing about a foot of water and was shipped from Demerara 
in May, arriving in Philadelphia on the 15th of June, apparently 
uninjured by the tossing to which the vessel had been subjected 
during the voyage. She was at once placed in a glass tank con- 
taining about forty-five hundred gallons of water, at a temperature 
of about 75 degrees,—the weather being warm, this was about 
the natural degree, and only once while the animal lived was it 
necessary to heat the water artificially to keep it at this point. 
The great difficulty was to get it to feed. The ship captain who 
brought it up, said, “Oh! there is no trouble about that, it will : 
eat anything,” and insisted that he had been feeding it on ship- 
biscuit and cabbage, but when this was tried, the ship-biscult — 
a 
