Between these two put the sailor, always superstitious and of ready credulity, and very often ignorant that the stories and the figure were not the actual results of human experience, and, their reality assumed, whatever strange thing he saw in his wanderings would be naturally referred to them, whether it were an occasional Dugong, or only a seal erected in the water at such a distance that the sunbeams on his shining coat made it seem white.
And this is the natural history of the Mermaid.
Aside from this, if one were Quixotically inclined to assert the Mermaid, he would find in all that has been said nothing of weight against it; and after what has been proved to have existed, it is hard to say what is impossible. The Ichthyophagi of Diodorus, while they retained their human form, were more than half-fish, fishes in blood and instinct very clearly. Tendencies exaggerate themselves very strangely in a few centuries. A negro's under-lip has been so big as to hang down before him like an apron. Cuvier declares that we "may trace the gradations of one and the same plan, from man to the last of the fishes"; and Mr. Darwin's theory appears to involve something like Mermaids as inevitable links, existing or extinct, in the chain of universal life.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] See Memoirs of an Oriental Residence.—Sir James Forbes.
SKIPPER BEN.
Sailing away!
Losing the breath of the shores in May,—
Dropping down from the beautiful bay,
Over the sea-slope vast and gray!
And the Skipper's eyes with a mist are blind;
For thoughts rush up on the rising wind
Of a gentle face that he leaves behind,
And a heart that throbs through the fog-bank dim,
Thinking of him.
Far into night
He watches the gleam of the lessening light
Fixed on the dangerous island-height
That bars the harbor he loves from sight;
And he wishes at dawn he could tell the tale
Of how they had weathered the southwest gale,
To brighten the cheek that had grown so pale
With a sleepless night among spectres grim,—
Terrors for him.