251, of the "Ancient Monuments."

It should be noted that the physiognomy of Fig. 6, above given, although unquestionably of an otter, agrees more closely with the several so-called manatees, which are represented without fishes, than with the fish-bearing otter, first mentioned, Fig. 4.

Fig. 6 thus serves as a connecting link in the series, uniting the unmistakable otter, with the fish in its mouth, to the more clumsily executed and less readily recognized carvings of the same animal.

Fig. 8.—Lamantin or sea-cow of Squier and Davis.

Fig. 9.—Lamantin or sea-cow of Squier.

It was doubtless the general resemblance which the several specimens of the otters and the so-called manatees bear to each other that led Stevens astray. They are by no means facsimiles one of the other. On the contrary, while no two are just alike, the differences are perhaps not greater than is to be expected when it is considered that they doubtless embody the conceptions of different artists, whose knowledge of the animal, as well as whose skill in carving, would naturally differ widely. Recognizing the general likeness, Stevens perhaps felt that what one was all were. In this, at least, he is probably correct, and the following reasons are deemed sufficient to show that, whether the several sculptures figured by one and another author are otters or not, as here maintained, they most assuredly are not manatees. The most important character possessed by the sculptures, which is not found in the manatee, is an external ear. In this particular they all agree. Now, the manatee has not the slightest trace of a pinna or external ear, a small orifice, like a slit, representing that organ. To quote the precise language of Murie in the Proceedings of the London Zoological Society, vol. 8, p. 188: "In the absence of pinna, a small orifice, a line in diameter, into which a probe could be passed, alone represents the external meatus." In the dried museum specimen this slit is wholly invisible, and even in the live or freshly killed animal it is by no means readily apparent. Keen observer of natural objects, as savage and barbaric man certainly is, it is going too far to suppose him capable of representing an earless animal—earless at least so far as the purposes of sculpture are concerned—with prominent ears. If, then, it can be assumed that these sculptures are to be relied upon as in the slightest degree imitative, it must be admitted that the presence of ears would alone suffice to show that they cannot have been intended to represent the manatee. But the feet shown in each and all of them present equally unquestionable evidence of their dissimilarity from the manatee. This animal has instead of a short, stout fore leg, terminating in flexible fingers or paws, as indicated in the several sculptures, a shapeless paddle-like flipper. The nails with which the flipper terminates are very small, and if shown at all in carving, which is wholly unlikely, as being too insignificant, they would be barely indicated and would present a very different appearance from the distinctly marked digits common to the several sculptures.

Noticing that one of the carvings has a differently shaped tail from the others, the authors of the "Ancient Monuments" attempt to reconcile the discrepancy as follows: "Only one of the sculptures exhibits a flat truncated tail; the others are round. There is however a variety of the lamantin (Manitus Senigalensis, Desm.) which has a round tail, and is distinguished as the "round-tailed manitus." (Ancient Monuments, p. 252.) The suggestion thus thrown out means, if it means anything, that the sculpture exhibiting a flat tail is the only one referable to the manatee of Florida and southward, the M. Americanus, while those with round tails are to be identified with the so-called "Round-tailed Lamantin," the M. Senegalensis, which lives in the rivers of Senegambia and along the coast of Western Africa. It is to be regretted that the above authors did not go further and explain the manner in which they suppose the Mound-Builders became acquainted with an animal inhabiting the West African coast. Elastic as has proved to be the thread upon which hangs the migration theory, it would seem to be hardly capable of bearing the strain required for it to reach from the Mississippi Valley to Africa.

Had the authors been better acquainted with the anatomy of the manatees the above suggestion would never have been made, since the tails of the two forms are, so far as known, almost exactly alike. A rounded tail is, in fact, the first requisite of the genus Manatus, to which both the manatees alluded to belong, in distinction from the forked tail of the genus Halicore.

Whether the tails of the sculptured manatees be round or flat matters little, however, since they bear no resemblance to manatee tails, either of the round or flat tailed varieties, or, for that matter, to tails of any sort. In many of the animal carvings the head alone engaged the sculptor's attention, the body and members being omitted entirely, or else roughly blocked out; as, for instance, in the case of the squirrel given above, in which the hind parts are simply rounded off into convenient shape, with no attempt at their delineation. Somewhat the same method was evidently followed in the case of the supposed manatees, only after the pipe cavities had been excavated the block was shaped off in a manner best suited to serve the purpose of a handle. Without, however, attempting to institute farther comparisons, two views of a real manatee are here subjoined, which are fac-similes of Murie's admirable photo-lithograph in Trans. London Zoological Society, vol. 8, 1872-'74. A very brief comparison of the supposed manatees, with a modern artistic representation of that animal, will show the irreconcilable differences between them better than any number of pages of written criticism.

Fig. 10.—Manatee (Manatus Americanus, Cuv.). Side view.

There would seem, then, to be no escape from the conclusion that the animal sculptures which have passed current as manatees do not really resemble that animal, which is so extraordinary in all its aspects and so totally unlike any other of the animal creation as to render its identification in case it had really served as a subject for sculpture, easy and certain.

Fig. 11.—Manatee (Manatus Americanus, Cuv.). Front view.

As the several sculptures bear a general likeness to each other and resemble with considerable closeness the otter, the well known fish-eating