The Romance of Natural History, Second Series

by Philip Henry Gosse

MERMAIDS.

According to Berosus there came up from the Red Sea, on the shore contiguous to Babylonia, a brute creature named Oannes, which had the body of a fish, above whose front parts rose the head of a man; it had two human feet, which projected from each side of the tail; it had also a human voice and human language. This strange monster sojourned among the rude people during the day, taking no food, but retiring to the sea again at night; and continued for some time, teaching them the arts of civilised life. Other ancient authors, as Polyhistor and Apollodorus, allude to the same tradition; and we gather that the portrait of the learned stranger (not painted from the life, we may presume, considering the condition of the people when he appeared, unless we may suppose it to have been the effort of one of his pupils in the pictorial art under his instruction) was preserved at Babylon to the historic period.

In an elaborate sculpture of the later Assyrian period, discovered by M. Botta at Khorsabad, a maritime expedition is portrayed, and the sea around the ships is filled with various marine animals, and among them the compound mythic forms of winged bulls and bull-lions, in which the Assyrians delighted, together with a figure composed of the body and tail of a fish extended horizontally, and the perpendicular trunk and foreparts of a man, crowned with the sacred cap, possibly representing the traditional Oannes.

The god Dagon of the Philistines, and the goddess Atergatis of the Syrians were worshipped under the same combination of the human and piscine forms, and the Tritons of classical mythology perpetuated the idea.

It is curious that in almost all ages and in almost all countries there should have prevailed a belief in the actual living existence of creatures like this. Was the mythological symbol the origin of the persuasion? Or is there any marine animal uniting so much of the general form of the fish with that of man as to have given the conception of the idol? A naturalist of deserved eminence has maintained, on purely scientific grounds, that such an animal must exist,—that the laws of nature absolutely require such a being; and though the amount of force which his reasoning, possesses will be estimated differently according as we reject or accept the hypothesis of the circularity of the great plan of nature, we may as well see what he has to say for a marine primate,—be he man or ape, mermaid or mermonkey.

"There is yet," says Mr Swainson, "another primary type necessary to complete the circle of the quadrumanous animals, and it is that which we have elsewhere distinguished as the natatorial; but of such an animal we have only vague and indefinite accounts. It will be seen that, throughout the whole class of quadrupeds, the aquatic types are remarkably few, and in general scarce; and that they contain fewer forms or examples than any other, and are often, in the smaller groups, entirely wanting. To account for this is altogether impossible; we can only call attention to the fact, as exemplified in the aquatic order of Cetacea, in that of the Feræ, in the Pachydermata, in the circle of the Glires, and in all the remaining natatorial types of the different circles of quadrupeds. We do not implicitly believe in the existence of mermaids as described and depicted by the old writers—with a comb in the one hand and a mirror in the other; but it is difficult to imagine that the numerous records of singular marine animals, unlike any of those well known, have their origin in fraud or gross ignorance. Many of these narratives are given by eye-witnesses of the facts they vouch for—men of honesty and probity, having no object to gain by deception, and whose accounts have been confirmed by other witnesses equally trustworthy. Can it be supposed that the unfathomable depths of ocean are without their peculiar inhabitants, whose habits and economy rarely, if ever, bring them to the surface of the watery element? As reasonably might a Swiss mountaineer disbelieve in the existence of an ostrich, because it cannot inhabit his Alpine precipices, as that we should doubt that the rocks and caverns of the ocean are without animals destined to live in such situations, and such only. The natatorial type of the Quadrumana, however, is most assuredly wanting. Whatever its precise construction may or might have been, it would represent and correspond to the seals in the circle of the Feræ, or rapacious quadrupeds; while a resemblance to the Simiadæ, or monkeys, must be considered an essential character of any marine animal which is to connect and complete the circular series of types in the Quadrumana."

Mr Swainson absolutely excludes Man from the zoological circle, on grounds which few naturalists are disposed to think sufficient; else we might suggest that man himself is the natatorial type of the Primates. Taking this author's own selection[87] of the characters which mark the natatorial types of animals, for our guide, we find that the largest size, the smallest fore-limbs, the most obtuse muzzle, the most carnivorous appetite, and the most natatory habits (for I do not know that the Apes, or the Sapajous, or the Lemurs, or the Bats, ever take to the water voluntarily, whereas savage Man is always a great swimmer), belong to Man, and so, Swainsonio ipso judice, constitute him the true aquatic primate. But if so, we do not want a merman or mermonkey; nay, we should not know where to insert him in the zoological circle if we found him; he would be awkwardly de trop.

But yet nature has an awkward way of mocking at our impossibilities; and it may be that green-haired maidens with oary tails lurk in the ocean caves, and keep mirrors and combs upon their rocky shelves. Certainly the belief in them is very widely spread, and occasionally comes to us from quarters where we should hardly have looked for it. A negro from Dongola assured Prince Puckler Muskau that in the country of Sennaar there was no doubt that Sirens (mermaids) still existed, for that he himself had seen more than one.[88]

In my boyhood I well recollect being highly excited by the arrival in our town, at fair-time, of a "show," which professed to exhibit a mermaid, whose portrait, on canvas hung outside, was radiant in feminine loveliness and piscine scaliness. I fondly expected to see the very counterpart within, how disposed I did not venture to imagine, but alive and fascinating, of course. Had I not seen her picture? I joyfully paid my coppers, but oh! woful disappointment! I dimly saw, within a dusty glass case, in a dark corner, a shrivelled and blackened little thing which might have been moulded in mud for aught I could see, but which was labelled, "MERMAID!" So great was my disgust, so bitter my feelings of shame and anger at having been so grossly taken in, that I did not care to observe what might have been noteworthy in it. I read afterwards that it was a very ingenious cheat; the trunk and head of a monkey had been grafted on to the body and tail of a large salmon-like fish, and the junction had been so cleverly effected, that only a very close examination detected the artifice. It professed to have been brought from China, but possibly was an importation even thither, if Steinmetz is correct. According to this writer, "A Japanese fisherman contrived to unite the upper half of a monkey to the lower half of a fish, so neatly as to defy ordinary inspection. He then gave out that he had caught the creature alive in his net, but that it had died shortly after being taken out of the water; and he derived considerable pecuniary profit from his cunning in more ways than one. The exhibition of the sea-monster to Japanese curiosity paid well; but yet more productive was the assertion that the half-human fish, having spoken the few minutes it existed out of its native element, had predicted a certain number of years of wonderful fertility, and a fatal epidemic, the only remedy for which would be possession of the marine prophet's likeness. The sale of these pictured mermaids was immense. Either this composite animal, or another, the offspring of the success of the first, was sold at the Dutch factory, and transmitted to Batavia, where it fell into the hands of a speculating American, who brought it to Europe, and here, in the years 1822-3, exhibited his purchase as a real mermaid at every capital, to the admiration of the ignorant, the perplexity of the learned, and the filling of his own purse. Indeed, the mermaids exhibited in Europe and America, to the great profit of the enterprising showmen, have all been of Japanese manufacture."[89]

This, however, will not account for the frequent reports of the living creatures having been seen, and unbelievers have to form some other hypothesis. In the tropical seas the cow-whales, uncouth marine pachydermata, have been assumed to be the originals of these stories. Megasthenes reported that the sea which washed Taprobane, the modern Ceylon, was inhabited by a creature having the appearance of a woman; and Ælian improves the account by stating that there are whales having the form of satyrs. 'Tis true the Manatee and the Dugong are rather mer-swine than mer-maids; but there is something in the bluff round head which may remind a startled observer of the human form divine. Sir Emerson Tennent considers that this rude approach to the human outline, and the attitude of the mother while suckling her young, pressing it to her breast with one paw, while swimming with the other, the head of both being held perpendicularly above water, and then, when disturbed, suddenly diving and displaying her broad fin-like tail,—these, together with her habitual demonstrations of strong maternal affection, may probably have been the original from which the pictures of the mermaid were portrayed, and thus that earliest invention of mythical physiology may be traced to the Arab seamen and to the Greeks, who had watched the movements of the Dugong in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.