are also complete sea men, differing in no respect from us, but that they are stupid, and covered with scales: for, though our organization seems to exclude us essentially from the class of amphibious animals, yet anatomists well know that the foramen ovale may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case, not necessary to life: and how can it be otherwise explained that the Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under the water? and that the famous Swedish gardener, of Troningholm, lived a day and a half under the ice, without being drowned? A Nereid, or mermaid, was taken in the year 1403, in a Dutch lake, and was in every respect like a French woman, except that she did not speak. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, an English ship, a hundred and fifty leagues from land, in the Greenland
