Any fond gentleman have a mermaid?

    You lovers who have dreamed of the melodious Lorelei in the storied Rhine; you passionate adventurers who have longed to be Ulysses, lashed to the mast, with a penknife to cut the lashings; you bathhouse Tritons who have longed for sea-maidens who didn't wear high heels on beaches, because fishtails and bathing shoes don't gee; you Polyphemuses and you Glaucuses to whose fond fancy Galatea, porpoise-drawn, alone will suffice—for all of you the blissful news is here.
    The mermaid is real. There are sirens in the sea more genuine than any song by romancing Homer, more quick with life than the noticeably healthy imitations you have been enraptured with on the operatic stage.
    Be satisfied with that. Read no further. Stick to the good old tales of the shellbacks who have been wooed by sirens in shoals, and would have brought ’em along home for marriage and divorce if only some trick of balky fate hadn't ravished them from eager sailor arms.
    The rest of this tale is for the girls you have been so ready to forsake? It'll comfort them more than it can please you, because, while the realty is genuine, it is very different from your poetic dreams.
    The mermaid proves a creature far indeed from the ideal sea-maiden the romancers have pictured her, as far from the fatal fascinations of her reputation as her abode is from the languorous tropics to which the myth of natural history has assigned her. She doesn't haunt the soft Aegean or comb her streaming locks on sunny Grecian shores. It's the Bering sea for hers; and if any one goes a-wooing sirens, he can omit the tortoise-shell comb and the white bristle brush from the toilet set he's taking along. They may prove baldheaded. The mermaid as she has appeared in the flesh wouldn't arouse the jealousy of a two-weeks’ bride.
    The zoologists of France are just now trailing along with their microscopes and measuring tapes in the wake of the crowds of ordinary humans who are flocking to Dijon, in France, to gaze on a natural-born siren, who, that or which has been placed on public view. She—or is she It?—was found in a cave on Bering sea. She—might as well give her the benefit of the doubt—was, alas! extremely dead when found. But she is all there except her hair, the skull being covered with a bare yellowish skin. Nobody can tell yet whether she was born that way or whether a rival snatched her tresses from her to make an extra rat; fashions are a bit behind-hand near the north pole.
    As far down as her waist the siren at Dijon is a woman, with a woman's breasts and with arms and hands altogether human, except that the fingers end in great claws. Her teeth, instead of being pearly jewels of beauty set in coral, are as pedalled a cat's—very useful in the assimilation of porgies and whitefish, but scarcely an asset for a Venus.
    Below the waist she is plain fish; of enormous proportions as to the tall, as might be expected of any fish equipped with an upper body the size, of a woman. If there is beauty to her at all, it is to be found in the fish half, which is all elegance and grace from the piscatorial point of view, where the human features above are those of a freak or monstrosity.
    French scientists, for the time being, seem to have taken the specimen seriously and are giving her an honest consideration. The local public is divided as to her genuineness, although with the majority seeing is believing. In the past mermaid fakes have been worked in the United States as well as in Europe, with appeals to, the credulity of all classes of people. A few years ago the mermaid was a common sideshow attraction with the small circus—not a very difficult illusion to produce under conditions of flickering artificial light and a stream of spectators hustled along so fast that they had only a hurried glimpse of the blonde lady from Fourth avenue, New York, wearing a scaly tail more or less neatly attached to her at the hips.
    In an eastern “medical” museum there was shown for many years the mummy of a little mermaid which in most particulars, corresponded to the formation of the siren now on view at Dijon. But it stayed in the museum window so long and it dried out so completely that, after a while, passersby had no difficulty in discerning where and how the fishtail had been joined to the body of a malformed and very small infant.
    The siren from Bering sea, should she by any wonderful chance prove to be the real thing, would leave the human belles of the seashore forever free from mermaid rivalry. The only word that can describe the appearance of such a libel on womanhood is “hideous.”
    Anatomists have never been able to imagine how the mermaid could exist, for the whole economy of one structure negatives that of the other.
    Yet a modification of the siren of tradition might possibly live under a modification of the conditions that have been attributed to her. Replace the human legs from the thighs downward with two tails and leave the creature only slightly amphibious—no more than the capacity for extended submersion that belongs to Indian pearl divers—and it is possible to conceive of the womanfish not only surviving to maturity in the shelter of ocean caves, but of reproducing her kind after the manner of the human mother.
    Science has found many a truth—fancifully distorted, it must be admitted—in the myths and legends which were long regarded as wanton insults to the average intelligence.

The Hawaiian Star. (Honolulu [Oahu]), 30 Sept. 1911. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.