THE EVENING WORLD — MAY 09, 1889
A Bona-Fide Mermaid. [From the Chicago Tribune]
What the late lamented Pliny, Ælian and Pausanias described as having been seen by sailors, a Tribune reporter saw and handled yesterday—a mermaid. E. S. Skinner, whose office is at No.323 Rookery Building, received from Honolulu last week what purports to be a bona-fide mermaid. The late arrival is not what one would expect a mermaid to be after reading her numerous biographies written by poets, past and present. Candidly speaking, she is faded. Her cheeks are sunken and eyes gone. Instead of a voluptuous and symmetrical form the human portion of her body is merely a succession of badly shaped ribs, unconnected by the commonplace but highly useful vertebræ. The flesh and skin are sunken and dried. The head suggests the lower type of man, or possibly the higher form of the ape species. A soft hairy substance of an oakum hue surmounts the head. The chimpanzee-shaped mouth discloses a double row of small, pointed teeth. The piscatorial portion of the freak is in a better stage of preservation. The scales are intact, as are the after fins. The extreme ends of the tail bones are missing. To the close observer the value of the specimen, considered from a naturalist’s point of view, is destroyed by examining the abrasion in the skin near the shoulders. The interior has an appearance suggestive of inorganic rather than organic substances. Mr. Skinner, however, is loath to look upon the specimen as anything but a real, genuine, old-fashioned mermaid, slightly disfigured but still in the glass top box which he keeps in his safe.
The Evening World. (New York, N.Y.), 09 May 1889. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
