Men have a commodious faith generally, and in the things of land and water; but they do not believe in the mermaid.
Once, a thousand years ago, a certain Arabian traveller described an Oriental fish that came up out of the sea to catch flies or to get a drink. It was no crabbed crustacean, no compromise of claws; but a fish with fins,—a perch: and, being a perch, it not only came up on dry land, but did, the traveller said, climb trees. There was a climax! No one characterized this story fitly, for all perceived that the Arabian must know its nature very well. And so the Arabian traveller died in good time, and the thousand years went on about their business, and in our days the fish story has been verified. Now it rests, partly, on the authority of "two Dutch naturalists residing at Tranquebar." Two Dutch naturalists are a good foundation for anything less than a pyramid. In this matter they are not alone, however; for the naturalist Daldorf, also, who was a lieutenant in the Danish East-India Company's service, communicated to Joseph Banks, who "did not believe in the mermaid," that "in the year 1791 he had taken this fish from a moist cavity in the stem of a Palmyra palm which grew near a lake." More than this, "he saw it when already five feet above the ground struggling to ascend still higher." And this was its process: "suspending itself by its gill-covers, and bending its tail to the left, it fixed its anal fin in the cavity of the bark, and sought by expanding its body to urge its way upward"; and its progress was arrested only by the hand with which the valiant Daldorf seized it. More in reference to the same fish may be found in Tennent's great book on Ceylon, in Hartwig, and later naturalists generally.
Men would naturally doubt of fish in trees. Even the Chinese would. "To climb a tree in pursuit of fish," is a phrase actually used as an hyperbole of nonsense by many Tsze, in the book called "Shang Mung." And the above is therefore a fair instance of the progress of human intelligence,—of a thousand years of incredulity, and final scientific admission. Let it be taken here as absinthe, appetizingly.
The ancients believed, among other things, that man had, to say the least, relations in the various departments of Nature and in the various divisions of animal life; that there were wild men who lived in the forests, and differed from man proper principally in other than physical respects; and that there were wild men who lived in the sea: also that there were beings half-man and half-horse; others half-man and half-bird; and others, again, half-man and half-fish. In respect to the wild man of the woods, it may be said that those words are the literal signification of the Malayan words orang outang; and that animal's appearance seems to determine that the Satyr and kindred creatures were not entirely imaginations. For the half-man and half-horse we have abundant explanation in the various wild riding tribes of men, especially the Tartars. The half-bird appears to have been distinguished for only a singing reason, and is therefore, as it were, a piece of heraldry. For the wild man of the sea, and the half-man and half-fish, what have we?
Let us see.
Apparently the earliest presentation to men's eyes of that form under which the mermaid is still figured was the image, in very ancient days, of Derceto, goddess of the Philistines of Ascalon, in a temple of that city. She was woman above and fish below. She had been a beautiful virgin, but had excited that all-prevalent passion since irregulated by Aphrodite. It proved her ruin, she cast herself into the sea, and suffered the partial metamorphosis. So was it fabled in that land: but it is much more plausibly thought that the combination of woman and fish declared, hieroglyphically, some dim knowledge that those ancients had of certain relations between the moon and the sea, of which things the respective parts were typical.
Half-fishy also was the form of that Dagon which in Ashdod, or Azotus, another city of the Philistines, fell down upon his face before the ark of the Lord. This Dagon was the god, apparently, in whose honor the Philistines were gathered together on that day when blind Samson "took hold of the two middle pillars," and let down the roof, and caught so many swallows.
According to an ancient fable, preserved by Berosus, this is what was known of Dagon. In the first year, there appeared, coming out of that part of the Erythræan Sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal whose whole body was that of a fish; but under the fish's head he had another head, with feet below similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice was articulate and human, and he taught men to construct cities, to found temples, compile laws,—indeed, taught them everything that could tend to soften them from a state of natural barbarism; and hence he was called Oannes, a name that signified "the Enlightener"; and this name journeying westward became contracted into On, and had prefixed to it the Dag, signifying a fish, and so became Dagon.
An image of Oannes is mentioned by Berosus as preserved in his time, and one has been found on the walls of Nimroud. In the ruins near Khorsabad was found another of Dagon in his final Phœnician form. Engravings of both these may be seen in "Nineveh and its Palaces."
In the story of Oannes we have probably the account preserved by a rude people of the advent among them at a very early period of one more enlightened than themselves; just as the Peruvians accounted in their peculiar way for the coming of Manco Capac. He comes also from a land farther east, by the Persian Gulf. These people were at the time very likely ignorant of even the most rudimentary navigation, and hence coming by water he was to them a fish indeed.