This, however, will not account for the frequent reports of the living creatures having been seen, and unbelievers have to form some other hypothesis. In the tropical seas the cow-whales, uncouth marine _pachydermata_, have been assumed to be the originals of these stories. Megasthenes reported that the sea which washed Taprobane, the modern Ceylon, was inhabited by a creature having the appearance of a woman; and Ælian improves the account by stating that there are whales having the form of satyrs. 'Tis true the Manatee and the Dugong are rather mer-swine than mer-maids; but there is something in the bluff round head which may remind a startled observer of the human form divine. Sir Emerson Tennent considers that this rude approach to the human outline, and the attitude of the mother while suckling her young, pressing it to her breast with one paw, while swimming with the other, the head of both being held perpendicularly above water, and then, when disturbed, suddenly diving and displaying her broad fin-like tail,--these, together with her habitual demonstrations of strong maternal affection, may probably have been the original from which the pictures of the mermaid were portrayed, and thus that earliest invention of mythical physiology may be traced to the Arab seamen and to the Greeks, who had watched the movements of the Dugong in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The early Portuguese settlers in India had no doubt that true mermen were found in those seas; and the annalist of the exploits of the Jesuits narrates that seven of these monsters, male and female, were captured at Manaar in 1560, and carried to Goa, where they were dissected by Demas Bosquez, physician to the Viceroy, and "their internal structure found to be in all respects conformable to the human." Making allowance for the very limited acquaintance which the worthy physician was likely to have made with human anatomy by actual autopsy, this statement goes for little:--the real resemblance, assuming them to have been Dugongs, was about the same as that presented by the hog, whose inwards are popularly believed by our own country people to be in very close accordance with those of "Christians." Sir E. Tennent has embellished his book with a very taking portrait of the mermaid on the Dugong hypothesis; shewing two females, each holding a baby [is it right to say _merbaby_?], emerging from the sea-wave; they do look, to be sure, sufficiently human, but the well-known monogram of our clever friend Wolf in the corner of the cut suggests shrewd doubts that the portraits were not "_ad viv_."