English: Illustrations accompanying Bartholin's commentary on the siren (mermaid) Historiarum anatomicarumII (1654).
The upright "siren" in the picture, though appearing female, is that described in the text as "homo marinus (sea-man)" captured in Brazil by merchants of the West India Company, and dissected at Leiden by Petrus Pavius (Pieter Pauw), with Joannes de Laet also present: its "head and the breast even as far as the navil(sic.) was of an humane shape, but.. without the sign of a tail". Bartholin came into possession of the skeletal hand and rib (figures right) through his friend, de Laet.[1][2][3]
Bartholin classified it among Phocae (seals), but it must have been a manatee.[3]
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer.
↑Webster, John (1677) "Chap. XV. Of divers Creatures that have a real existence in Nature, and yet by reason of their wonderous properties, or seldom being seen, have been taken for Spirits, and Devils" in The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, London: J. M., pp. 285–286
↑ abBroedel, Hans Peter (2018), “2. The Mermaid of Edam Meets Medical Science: Empiricism and the Marvelous in Seventeenth-Century Zoological Thought”, in Monsters and Borders in the Early Modern Imagination[1], Routledge, ISBN9780429878855
Captions
Siren (left); siren's hand skeleton and rib (right)
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