Another extant member of the “mermaid” family is the manatee, found on both sides of the Atlantic in the warm, fresh water rivers of Africa and South America. Although never mistaken for a human, it is accorded considerable superstitious regard. The Kalaboi of Nigeria regard it as a sacred animal and the incarnation of a human soul. If a fisherman kills one, by accident or otherwise, he must undergo an elaborate cleansing ceremony which involves offerings before images of his ancestors and remaining indoors for three days. During this period he is rubbed from head to foot with a yellow pigment by women of his family. While the purgative rites are in progress the women sing at dawn and dusk. On the third day there is a feast on the meat, but a bit must be given to every household in the village to lay upon the shrines of ancestors. Both manatee and dugong, and formerly the extinct sea cow of Bering Sea, are probably the closest living relatives of the elephant. They have similar brain and heart structure. The molar teeth of the mermaid family are like those of early elephants. The male dugong has tusks. There also is a great extension of the upper lip which overlaps the side of the mouth—a start in the direction of a trunk. The next nearest relatives of the elephants are the hyraces, or conies, of Africa and Syria, best known in the form of expensive fur coats. They look and act like rabbits. A Hebrew prophet made them symbolic of timidity. Only a taxonomist would suspect these little creatures could claim any kinship to the largest of land mammals. _Limbless Lizards and Glass Snakes_ A supposedly welcome guest in the underground chambers of leaf cutter ants is the amphisbaena, a nearly limbless lizard about a foot long which looks somewhat like a gigantic earth worm. These creatures, seldom seen, can be found from Brazil north to lower California and there is one isolated species in Florida. “Those brought to me,” observed the noted British naturalist and explorer of Brazil, Henry Walter Bates, “were generally not much more than a foot in length. They are of cylindrical shape having, properly speaking, no neck, and the blunt tail which is only about an inch in length is of the same shape as the head. This peculiar form, added to their habit of wriggling backwards as well as forwards, has given rise to the fable that they have two heads, one at each extremity. They are extremely sluggish in their motions, and are clothed with scales that have the form of small imbedded plates arranged in rings around the body. The eye is so small as to be scarcely perceptible.