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THE MANATEE 
THE SIRENIA OR MANATEES AND DUGONGS 
The dugongs and manatees are the only mammals, save 
the cetacea, which possess paddles instead of ambulatory 
fore limbs, and in which the hind limbs have disappeared 
—that is to say which possess this combination of 
characters, for the seals and sea lions may be fairly 
said to move by paddles. They can be readily dis- 
tinguished from the whales and dolphins by their 
much less markedly fishlike aspect; the skeleton 
and anatomy generally is indicative of a beast which 
has more recently taken to the purely aquatic life than 
have the whales. Dr. Semon truly remarked of the 
dugong, that it appeared to the eye “more fishlike 
than seals, and more mammal-like than whales.” The 
hairy covering of the body has entirely disappeared 
in whales save for a few hairs upon the snout in some 
cases. In the Sirenia, though the body is practically 
naked, there are yet traces here and there over the 
general body surface of hairs. Besides the manatee and 
the dugong there was, until the close of the eighteenth 
century, a huge thirty foot long sirenian known as 
Rhytina upon the shores of Behring’s straits. 
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THE MANATEE 
The fact that on the rare occasions when a manatee 
is exhibited in the gardens it is accommodated in the 
reptile house is no slur upon its Zoological position, 
but only due to the necessity of providing for a tropical 
animal a tropical temperature. The manatee, aquatic 
and “ finned ’”’ though it is, is a mammal, and belongs 
to an order which has been called with unnecessary 
poetry the Sirenia. The name embodies, however, 
the legend that these creatures are responsible for the 
origin of the Sirens. The manatee—and still more 
its Eastern ally the dugong—though by no means 
““mulier formosa superne,”’ undoubtedly “ desinit in 
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