It is to be regretted that Pliny did not give at more length the statement of this early scientific commission. He does not leave the subject immediately, however, but says,--
"I have some distinguished informants of equestrian rank, who state that they themselves once saw in the Ocean of Gades a sea-man which bore in every part of his body a perfect resemblance to a human being; and that during the night he would climb up into ships, upon which the side of the vessel where he seated himself would instantly sink downward, and, if he remained there any considerable time, even go under water."
Gades was Cadiz, and the Ocean of Gades was that part of the Atlantic lying south and west of Spain and west of Africa. The statement of the Merman's boarding a ship is, a little singularly, to be found as well in the ballad of the "Merman Rosmer," which comes into English from a Scandinavian source. The effect of his boarding a ship is identical also. He would seem to have been a heavy fellow, North and South.
"Nor yet," says Pliny, still on the same subject, "is the figure generally attributed to the Nereïds [Mermaids] at all a fiction; only in them the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales. For one of these creatures was seen upon the same shores, [Ocean of Gades,] and as it died its plaintive murmurs were heard, even by the inhabitants at a distance. The legates of Gaul, too, wrote word to the late Emperor Augustus, that a considerable number of Nereïds had been found dead upon the sea-shore."
Entire faith in the scales is not exacted of the reader, and the weight of authority, especially scientific, is against them. No marine mammals have scales. There is, of course, no knowing what they may have had. The statement of what the legates of Gaul wrote to the Emperor is of most consequence in this extract, and it is perhaps out of a natural respect for authority that we are inclined to give most weight to these official communications. Officials, it is true, have sometimes erred; but these officials agree with others, and to be stranded has been a common misfortune of mermen and maids.
Alexander of Alexandria, the good Bishop who had so healthy an abhorrence of Arianism, _saw_ (upon his own authority) a Nereïd (Mermaid) that had been thrown ashore on the coast of the Peloponnesus. Seeing was believing; and if the Bishop was right in so many things, all the way up to Divinity, is it possible that he could be wrong in the mere fact of a dead animal? Or if he was wrong in this particular, is not the whole question as to the right or wrong of Arianism opened again?