Page:Under the Sun.djvu/287

Rh one or two facts all the miscellaneous congregation of sirens, mermaids, mermen, tritons, sea-cows, sea-swine, sea-horses, mer-devils, sea-lions, water-satyrs, and Undines, — all the wilderness of aquatic prodigies delineated in Aldrovandus his “History of Monsters,” or spoken of from eye-witness by Maundeville, Olaus Magnus, and many another. The sub-order of the Sirenia now includes all those wonderful animals that have given the silly world so much pleasant fable, and wise men so much trouble, and they are now known as the Rhytinidæ and the Manatidæ. The first are extinct. Like the dodos, — which were so common in the Mauritius, when that island was first discovered, that the sailors chased them about by hundreds, knocking them on the head with stones, but of which now there are only two beaks, one foot, and a few feathers to bear witness that this great bird ever existed, — the Rhytina Stelleri, or Northern Manatee, was found swarming in 1741 upon the shores of an island in Behring’s Straits. For ten months the shipwrecked sailors entirely supported life upon its flesh and oil, and so it happened that when, just twenty-seven years later, an expedition went out to inquire if a manatee fishery would be profitable, it was found that not a single specimen remained. The family of Rhytina had been actually extinguished from the world’s list of living things in twenty-seven years, and the only remains of this astonishing animal at present known to -exist are one skull and a few other fragments in European museums. Of the other sub-family, the Manatidæ proper, many species are known to naturalists, and the commonest of these, the manatee of the American coast, is called by showmen the “West India Mermaid.”