The head of the siren is small; it seems to have as little use for brains as for feet. The snout is short and broad, with the nostrils near the tip; and as for eyes!--they are the tiniest little dots; evidently our siren does not depend much on taking observations of its surroundings. On the other hand the mouth of the creature is disproportionately large, opening across the entire head. The beastie lives to eat, and his mouth is, it seems, his chief organ. This ugly head sits close on an eel-like body which finishes up in a point at the tail, where there is a fin, as a fish has. The most conspicuous feature of the siren is the appendage placed branch-like on each side of the neck. These appendages have three divisions, each one with a separate attachment, and under each one is a small slit or opening into the siren’s throat. What are these branches waving like plumes? They are external gills, and very pretty they are, the only pretty things about a siren; these gills are of a pale rose-color shaded with gray, and waving and catching the light as the creature swims, they redeem him from absolute ugliness. I have often wondered why this animal has been named a siren, after the beautiful and fatal creature of fable. Beauty, song, malice; these were the three characteristics of the sirens of which old Homer sung, and not one of these endowments belongs to the siren of the marshes,--ugly, silent, harmless. He is hungry, and he eats, and his food is toads, frogs, insects, any animal organism he can find in the water. He merely opens his mouth and takes his prey in; he neither lulls it nor lures it with music. A first cousin of this lizard-formed siren, is the striped siren of Georgia. This has only one gill branch, and is distinguished by a broad, yellow band on each side, and a narrower one on the under part of the body. “A mud-eel” it is popularly called. It is very scarce, and valuable accordingly. Few of the museums or zoölogical gardens have specimens of this siren. No doubt ignorant and careless people, finding this odd and helpless creature in its native haunts, ruthlessly kill it, just because they can, and leave to decay specimens which, if taken living, or carefully preserved in alcohol, would have been of great value. The siren sometimes suffers the loss of its pretty gills in a queer way. Fishes, attracted by their roseate color, nibble them off. In such cases the siren can breathe by coming to the surface of the water, and taking in mouthfuls of air, which it suffers to escape through the slits at the neck. This method of breathing is evidently inconvenient and difficult to the creature, but allows it to maintain life until new gill-branches grow, a process which requires some eight weeks to accomplish. Some sirens wear a little gold-colored band about the lips and face, which band shines like molten metal in the water, and gives them a gay appearance.