Not a few of the tales of mermen and mermaids owe their origin to these creatures, as well as to seals, and even walruses. The Portuguese and Spaniards give the Manatee a name signifying "Woman-fish," and the Dutch call the Dugong the "Little Bearded Man." A very little imagination, and a memory only for the marvellous, doubtless sufficed to complete the metamorphosis of the half-woman, or man, half-fish, into a siren, a mermaid, or a merman. Hence the general name Sirenia.
The Manatee (_Manatus_) inhabits the west coast and rivers of tropical Africa, and the east coast and rivers of tropical America, the West Indies, and Florida.
The Dugong (_Halicore_) extends along the Red Sea coasts, the shores of India, and the adjacent islands, and goes as far as the northern and eastern coasts of Australia.
[Illustration: Fig. 58.--Skeleton of _Rhytina gigas_ (Steller's "Sea-Cow"), from a peat deposit, Behring's Island.]
The most remarkable Sirenian is the Rhytina gigas, or "Steller's Sea-Cow." Early in 1885 the trustees of the British Museum acquired a nearly complete skeleton of this animal, now extinct, from peat deposits in Behring's Island, of Pleistocene age. Formerly it was abundant along the shores of Kamtchatka, the Kurile Islands, and Alaska. It was first discovered by the German naturalist, Steller, who, in company with Vitus Behring, a captain in the Russian Navy and a celebrated navigator of the northern seas, was with his vessel and crew cast away upon Behring's Island (where Behring died) in 1741. Steller's original description is preserved in the _Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences St. Petersburg_. He saw it alive during his long enforced residence on the island. In the course of forty years, 1742-1782, it appears to have been exterminated, probably for the sake of its flesh and hide, around both Behring's Island and Copper Island, to the shores of which it was, in Steller's time, limited.
Fig. 58 shows its skeleton, 19 ft. 6 in. long, now preserved in the Geological Collection at South Kensington (Glass-case N). The skeletons are found, in the islands, at a distance from the shore in old raised beaches and peat-mosses, deeply buried and thickly overgrown with grass. They are discovered by boring into the peat with an iron rod, just as timber is found in Irish peat-bogs. (See restoration, Plate XXVI.)