It is, perhaps, among the Scandinavian races that the belief in the merman has reached its culminating point. So many particulars are inculcated concerning the mode and conditions of life of these submarine beings, that the most intimate relations appear to have subsisted between the terrestrial and the aquatic peoples. According to the creed of the Norsemen, there exists, far beneath the depths of the ocean, an atmosphere adapted to the breathing organs of beings resembling in form the human race, endowed with surpassing beauty, with limited supernatural powers, but liable to suffering, and even to death. Their dwelling is in a vast region, situate far below the bottom of the sea, which forms a canopy over them, like the sky over us, and there they inhabit houses constructed of the pearly and coralline productions of the ocean. Having lungs not adapted to a watery medium, but formed for breathing atmospheric air, it would be impossible for them to pass through the volume of waters that separates our world from theirs, if it were not that they possess the power of entering the skin of some marine animal, whose faculties they thus temporarily acquire, or of changing their own form and structure so as to suit the altered condition through which they are to travel. The most ordinary shape they assume is, as everybody knows, that of man (that is, their own proper form) from the waist upward, but below that of a fish. Whether they now breathe by gills or lungs, the anatomists, it seems, have not yet determined; we must presume the former alternative, since else it is not apparent what they have gained by their piscine metamorphosis of tail; though where the branchiæ are situate we are a little at a loss to imagine. These, however, are matters which doubtless the scientific world will one day determine: it seems certain that they do thus acquire an amphibious nature, so as not only to exist submerged in the waters, but to land on the shores of our sunny world, where they frequently doff their fishy half, resume their proper human form, and pass muster while they pursue their investigations here.[90]