There was no indication in the Fejee Mermaid of a junction between the fish body and the monkey head. The spine extended unbroken to the base of the skull. The shoulders were covered with animal hair, and under a microscope fish scales were visible beneath the hair. The face was of a monstrous ugliness, and the whole specimen, which was three feet long, was dried up and black. The misshapen arms, with their hideous long fingers on the ends of distorted hands, were turned up, and the right hand covered the right side of the face. The mouth was wide open, revealing bestial teeth, and the whole expression of the face gave the vivid impression that the animal had died in an extreme agony, which had been carefully preserved by its embalmers. It was Barnum’s private opinion, which he did not express until many years later, that The Fejee Mermaid, as he spelled it, was made in Japan, China, or India, and that it was probably an object of worship in one of those countries. Profoundly religious himself, in a Christian way, Barnum always enjoyed attributing hideousness to so-called pagan faiths. He found in Dr. Ph. Fr. von Siebold’s _Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century_ an account of a Japanese fisherman who joined the upper half of a monkey to the lower half of a fish so deftly that the joint could not be detected. The Japanese then announced to his fellow-countrymen that he had caught the object in his net, and that it had died soon after its capture. The mermaid was exhibited in Japan, and its Japanese owner maintained that it had spoken a few words before it died, in which it had predicted some years of fertility, to be followed by years of a fatal epidemic, the only remedy against which would be the possession of the prophet’s likeness. The sale in Japan of crude pictures of the animal was great, and the figure itself was finally sold to Dutch traders, who carried it to Batavia, “where,” according to Dr. von Siebold, “it fell into the hands of a shrewd American, who brought it to Europe, and there, in the years 1822–23, exhibited his purchase as a real mermaid, at every capital, to the admiration of the ignorant, the perplexity of the learned, and the filling of his own purse.” Barnum was convinced that this was his mermaid, and this its origin, and he hailed the Japanese fisherman as one of his brothers under the skin, who by his scheme for selling pictures and attracting crowds to the mermaid was entitled to occupy a throne along with Barnum as a Prince of Humbugs.