We cannot, for instance, attach much weight to the following story related by Hudson, the famous navigator:—“One of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid and calling up some of the company to see her, one more came up, and by that time she was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the men. A little after a sea came and overturned her. From the navel upward her back and breasts were like a woman’s, as they say that saw her; her body as big as one of us; her skin very white; and long hair hanging down behind, of colour black. In her going down they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise and speckled like a mackerel.” If Hudson himself had seen and thus described the creature it would have been possible to regard the story with some degree of credence; but his account of what Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner, men about whose character for veracity we know nothing, _said_ they saw, is of little weight. The skin very white, and long hair hanging down behind, are especially suspicious features of the narrative; and were probably introduced to dispose of the idea, which others of the crew may have advanced, that the creature was only some kind of seal after all. The female seal (_Phoca Greenlandica_ is the pretty name of the animal) is not, however, like the male, tawny grey, but dusky white, or yellowish straw-colour, with a tawny tint on the back. The young alone could be called “very white.” They are so white in fact as scarcely to be distinguishable when lying on ice and snow, a circumstance which, as Darwin considers, serves as a protection for these little fellows.