After the walrus comes a strange animal which has been ranked among Cetaceans (we shall see why presently), but which it would be better not to separate from the Amphibians, since an Amphibian order has been made, for it crawls from time to time upon land: this is the Manatee, or Sea-cow. It comes still nearer a fish than the others. Its forelimbs are absolute fins, with mere vestiges of nails at their edges; it has no hind ones, and its body, which is quite cylindrical, ends in a fin tail in the shape of a shovel. The sea-cow feeds on plants and herbage, and lives at the mouths of great rivers, going up them occasionally to great distances, their banks serving it for pasture ground. In some respects it is half brother to the hippopotamus and the great grass eating _Pachydermata_, to whom it comes so near in internal organization, and above all in the structure of its molars, that M. de Blainville seriously proposed ranking it among the elephants, though as an _irregular elephant_, as you may suppose. But then Cuvier had even placed the seal among the _Carnivora_, by the side of the cat, whose whiskers it possessed, and of the dog, whom it resembled in the formation of its head. A naturalist's office is sometimes very perplexing, I assure you; and as we are touching on this subject, I cannot resist telling you that the sea-cow laid claim to, on so many sides, had by right a free admission to the celebrated order of _Primates_, although it looks exactly like a large barrel elongated at the two ends. It suckles its young at the breast like man and the monkey; and if Linnæus flinched from this rather too absurd parentage, old navigators were less scrupulous. Observing this creature in the distance, sporting on the waves, the upper part of its body quite out of the sea, the sailors, whose eye is not of the most refined, and who have no objections generally to the marvellous, imagined they saw a new species of human beings; and hence arose those stories of mermaids and sirens which have been told from the days of Homer downwards, and the traditions of which have not yet quite died out in seaport towns. To have been passed from man to the whale, touching the elephant on the road, is a long way to travel, especially when, after all, one is only a huge barrel of amphibious fat; and you may judge from this that it is not always an easy thing to classify animals. ORDER 12. _Cetacea (whale-kind)_. Cetaceans are whales; and if I had been consulted on the matter, I should have joined this order and the last together, under whatever name was thought most appropriate. The passage from the seal to the whale through the walrus and the sea-cow is an easy and natural one, the two latter being obviously the connecting links; and in spite of certain diversities of food, they form in reality one family-party, as do the marsupials. But it is too late in the day to talk of this, my dear child, and you and I cannot pretend to alter what is taught in the schools.