COMMON RORQUAL. (After Flower.)
ORDER SIRENIA (THE MANATEES).
Introductory Remarks—Mermaids—Position—General Characteristics of the Order—[STELLER’S RHYTINA]—Habits—Extinct—[DUGONG]—Range—Habits—Uses—Teeth—[MANATEE]—Distribution—Peculiar Mouth—Mode of Feeding—Story of “Patcheley,” a Tame Manatee—Halitherium and other Fossil Forms.
THIS order of the Marine Mammalia comprises only a few animals, which, however, possess a peculiar interest to the zoologist. But two genera are now found alive, and a third genus was utterly extirpated about a century ago. Others are only known from fossil remains. Notwithstanding the ungainly, almost positively repulsive, appearance of the living forms, they yet have a hold on the popular imagination on account of their being the actual representatives of the famed Sirens and Mermaids of yore. The ancients, in their voyages to Eastern climes, gathered stories concerning the existence of strange creatures, half woman, half fish, chiefly frequenting the shores of Taprobane (Ceylon); and fancy, with oft-told but unchecked repetition of tales, soon lent a charm to the supposed beings, by conferring on these sea-nymphs imaginary flowing tresses, and sweet dulcet voices, by whose luring wiles the unwary mariner was entrapped, or led to destruction. Howsoever ridiculous such notions may now be regarded, they are, nevertheless, to be satisfactorily explained, for the singular Dugong, with its fish-like tail, roundish head, and mammæ on its breast, has the habit of occasionally raising half of its body perpendicularly out of the water and clasping its young to its breast. These actions have, doubtless, given a colourable pretext to all the fables of mermaids—those “missing links,” which even yet our children delight in, when narrated in “The Little Mermaid,” by the talented pen of a Hans Andersen.
The Manatee or Dugong group, partly from aquatic habitat and some outward resemblances, for long was classed among the Whales; by F. Cuvier they were termed the Grass-eating (“les Cétacés herbivores”) in contradistinction to the flesh-devouring Cete, or Whales proper. Early in this century Illiger signalised and defined them as a separate sub-order “Sirenia,” their organisation distinctly differing from that of the Whales; while De Blainville, later on, pressed their Elephant-like structures as entitling them to close proximity with these creatures—his “Gravigrades.”
SKELETON OF MANATEE. (Modified after De Blainville.)
a, Dotted outline of Lungs.