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Leaning against the masts and gunwale, or leisurely moving the oars, the soldiers could observe the dolphins leaping in the river, the sudden darts of the alligators as they hunted the fish through the water, or the clumsy movements of the manati, one of the Sirenia, as it cropped grass at the edge of the bank, to the danger of the eel-like lung fish, which sometimes goes up on to dry land.
There several groups of sea cows were living in family units. These were manatees, which belong to the order Sirenia, like the dugong and Steller's sea cow. Harmless and unaggressive, these fine animals were six to seven meters long and must have weighed at least 4,000 kilograms each. I told Ned Land and Conseil that farseeing nature had given these mammals a major role to play.
They are vegetarians, the whales feed on animals; the former never have the ribs articulated in the mode in which they are in some of the latter; the former have pectoral mammæ, and the latter are provided with two inguinal mammary glands, and have the nostrils enlarged into blowers, which the former have not. The former thus constitute the order Sirenia, while the latter belong to the Cetacea.
Simiadae, their origin and divisions. Similarity, sexual. Singing of the Cicadae and Fulgoridae; of tree-frogs; of birds, object of the. Sirenia, nakedness of. Sirex juvencus. Siricidae, difference of the sexes in. Siskin, pairing with a canary. Sitana, throat-pouch of the males of. Size, relative, of the sexes of insects. Skin, dark colour of, a protection against heat.
The Sirenia, so called by reason of their fanciful resemblance to the sirens of mythology, among which are the sea-cows, manatees, dugongs, etc., which are fish-like in structure and appearance, the fore-limbs being shaped like paddles, or fins, and the hind-limbs being absent or rudimentary;
"Good lord," the Canadian went on, "it's rolled over on its back, and it's raising its breasts in the air!" "It's a siren!" Conseil exclaimed. "With all due respect to master, it's an actual mermaid!" That word "siren" put me back on track, and I realized that the animal belonged to the order Sirenia: marine creatures that legends have turned into mermaids, half woman, half fish.
The larger Marsupials like the kangaroos are eminently saltatory, and the others are active in locomotion. The aquatic Mammals Sirenia and Cetacea have no scrotum, the testes being abdominal.
The Sirenia form a very distinct group of the mammals, and one of the most remarkable peculiarities in existing dugong and lamentin is the entire absence of hind limbs, without even a rudiment being left; but the extinct Halitherium had, according to Professor Flower, an ossified thigh-bone "articulated to a well-defined acetabulum in the pelvis," and it thus makes some approach to ordinary hoofed quadrupeds, to which the Sirenia are in other respects allied.
"In fact, the earlier forms of manatee were called Sirenia, and were considered to be the origin of the belief in mermaids. For they carried their little ones in their fore-flippers, almost as a human mother might do in her arms, and when swimming along would raise their heads out of water, so that they had a faint resemblance to a swimming woman." "How very odd!" cried Alice.
But I am surprised to find the Sirenia left in one group with the Cetacea, and the Plesiosauria with the Ichthyosauria; the ordinal distinctness of these having, to my mind, been long since fully established.
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