In 1737, according to a Scottish magazine, the crew of a ship newly arrived in the Thames river from the East Indies, reported that in the island of Mauritius they had partaken of a mermaid, the flesh of which was a great deal like veal. The mermaid weighed three or four hundred weight—rather a buxom specimen ! The heal was particularly large, and so were the features, which differed but little from those of a man or woman. The story tells of two of them, one with a beard, four or five inches long, the other much more feminine. “When they are first taken,” the narrator proceeds to say, “which is often on the ground, they cry and grieve with great sensibility.”
    About the same time a story cane from Vigo, in Spain; to the effect that some fishermen on that coast had caught a sort of a Merman, five feet and a half from head to foot. The head was like that of a goat, with a long beard and mustache, a black skin, somewhat hairy, a very long neck, short arms, hands longer and larger than they ought to be in proportion, and long fingers, with nails like claws; webbed toes, and a fin at the lower part of the back.
    The magazines for 1775 gave an account of a mermaid which was captured in the Levant and brought to London. One of the learned periodicals gravely told its readers that the mermaid had the complexion and features of a European, like these of a young woman ; that the eyes were light blue, the nose small and elegantly formed, the mouth small, the lips thin, “but the edges of them round like those of a codfish ;” that the teeth were small, regular, and white ; that the neck was well rounded, and that the ears were like those of the eel, “but placed like those of the human species, with gills for respiration, which appear like curls.” There was no hair on the head, but “rolls, which, at a distance, might be taken for curls.” There was a fin rising pyramidally from the temples, “forming a foretop, like that of a lady’s head-dress.” The bust was nearly like that of a young damsel, a proper orthodox mermaiden, but, alas ! all below the waist was exactly like a fish. Three sets of fins below the waist, one above the other, enabled her to swim. Finally, “It is said to have an enchanting voice, which it never exerts except before a storm.” The writer in the Annual Register probably did not see this mermaid, which the Gentleman’s Magazine described as being only three feet high. It was afterward proved to be a cheat, made from the skull of the angle shark.
    A Welsh farmer named Reynolds, living at Pen-y-hold in 1782, saw a something which he appears to have believed to be a mermaid ; he told the story to Dr. George Phillips, who told it to Mrs. Moore, who told it to a young lady pupil of hers, who wrote out an account of it for Mrs. Morgan, who inserted it in her “Tour to Milford Haven.” How much the story gained on its travels—like the Three Black Crows, or the parlor game of Russian Scandal—we are left to find out for ourselves ; but its ultimate form was nearly as follows :
    One morning, just outside the cliff, Reynolds saw what seemed to him to be a person bathing in the sea, with the upper part of the body out of the water. On nearer view, it looked like the upper part of a person in a tub, a youth, say, of sixteen or eighteen years of age, with nice white skin ; a sort of brownish body and a tail were under the water. The head and body were human in form, but the arms and hands thick in proportion to length, while the nose, running up high between the eyes, terminated rather sharply. The mysterious being looked attentively at Reynolds, and at the cliffs, and at the birds flying in the air, with a wild gaze, but uttered no cry. Reynolds went to bring some companions to see the merman or mermaid, but when he returned it had disappeared. If we like to suppose that Reynolds had seen some kind of seal, and that the narration had grown to something else by repeating from mouth to mouth, perhaps we shall not be very far wrong. —All the Year Round.

Beaufort Republican. [volume] (Beaufort, S.C.), 03 July 1873. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.