'But, seriously, Mr Asterias,' said the Honourable Mr Listless, 'do
you positively believe there are such things as mermaids?'
MR ASTERIAS
Most assuredly; and tritons too.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
What! things that are half human and half fish?
MR ASTERIAS
Precisely. They are the oran-outangs of the sea. But I am persuaded
that there are also complete sea men, differing in no respect from us,
but that they are stupid, and covered with scales; for, though our
organisation seems to exclude us essentially from the class of
amphibious animals, yet anatomists well know that the _foramen ovale_
may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case,
not necessary to life: and how can it be otherwise explained that the
Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under
the water; and that the famous Swedish gardener of Troningholm lived
a day and a half under the ice without being drowned? A nereid, or
mermaid, was taken in the year 1403 in a Dutch lake, and was in every
respect like a French woman, except that she did not speak. Towards
the end of the seventeenth century, an English ship, a hundred and
fifty leagues from land, in the Greenland seas, discovered a flotilla
of sixty or seventy little skiffs, in each of which was a triton, or
sea man: at the approach of the English vessel the whole of them,
seized with simultaneous fear, disappeared, skiffs and all, under
the water, as if they had been a human variety of the nautilus.
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