The Mermaid of Early Writers. 165 
with the mermaids of more modern times ; and much ingenuity 
has been lent to the discovery of the mode by which those enchant- 
ing songs, which lured to destruction the unhappy mariner, could 
be articulated by the cetacea, whose language is a groan. But the 
sirens were most probably abandoned women, inhabiting an island 
on the coast of Sicily, and leading to perdition all those strangers 
whom they could draw within their toils. It is otherwise, how- 
ever, with the naiads and tritons of antiquity, which seem to have 
taken their origin from our cetaceous tribes: the former were re- 
presented as young and handsome virgins, riding on dolphins’ 
backs, and the latter like a man above the waist, and a dolphin in 
his inferior parts. 
Of all the cetacea, that which approaches the nearest in form to 
man is undoubtedly the dugong, which, when its head and breast 
are raised above the water, and its pectoral fins, resembling hands, 
are visible, might easily be taken by superstitious seamen for a 
semi-human being. 
The dugong, named Halicore, (sea nymph,) in allusion to these 
popular tales, was till very lately confounded with the manatus and 
stelleria, and placed in the same genus with the walrus or morse. 
Camper first distinguished it from this carnivorous quadruped. 
Lieguat, Dampier, and others, described the dugong under the name 
“‘manatee of the Indies ;’ but Lacepede separated the walrus, the 
dugong, and the manatus, into three genera, and Cuvier has added as 
a fourth the stelleria, an animal from the sea of Kamtschatka, sup- 
posed by Steller to be a mere variety of the manatee. The walrus 
is now associated with the seal, amongst the Fere, and the mana- 
tee, dugong, and stelleria, compose the natural family of herbivo- 
rous cetacea. 
Only one species of the dugong has been described, (Halicore 
Indicus,) confined to the seas of the Indian archipelago. The 
characters of its organization bear a great resemblance to those of 
the manatee, the principal difference being in the number and kind 
of teeth.* Browsing on sea-weed near the shores of the ocean, 
the whole of this family of cetacea are intimately related to each 
other ; so great is the directing influence of similarity of food. The 
flattened molar teeth, the multiplied stomach, the mild disposition 
produced by vegetable diet, are all links which closely unite this 
family of pisciform mammalia. And in its external appearance, the 
dugong ditfers only from the manatee in the crescented form of its 
caudal fin, in the absence of nails from its pectoral fins, and in its 
superior lip being a little longer and more pendant. f 
* The geographical distribution of these two genera, however, differs ex- 
ceedingly : the manatee is only found in the Atlantic, while the dugong is 
confined to the Eastern Seas. 
+ This great external similarity might have formed an excuse for Sir Eve 
‘rard Home’s mistake, in calling the manatee “ a species of dugong”’ since the 
publication of the Regne Animal, had not the state of his knowledge led him 
rashly to pen the following passage :—“ In these two species of this extraordi- 
nary tribe of animals, between which there is so great a resemblance, the teeth 
