corals, and madrepores, that was the admiration and envy of the Royal
Society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the Sepia Octopus,
disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtle-dove of the ocean, and
come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed
in the tropical seas, and had watched, in eager expectation, though
unhappily always in vain, to see the colossal polypus rise from the
water, and entwine its enormous arms round the masts and the rigging.
He maintained the origin of all things from water, and insisted that
the polypodes were the first of animated things, and that, from their
round bodies and many-shooting arms, the Hindoos had taken their gods,
the most ancient of deities. But the chief object of his ambition, the
end and aim of his researches, was to discover a triton and a mermaid,
the existence of which he most potently and implicitly believed, and
was prepared to demonstrate, _a priori, a posteriori, a fortiori_,
synthetically and analytically, syllogistically and inductively,
by arguments deduced both from acknowledged facts and plausible
hypotheses. A report that a mermaid had been seen 'sleeking her soft
alluring locks' on the sea-coast of Lincolnshire, had brought him in
great haste from London, to pay a long-promised and often-postponed
visit to his old acquaintance, Mr Glowry.

Mr Asterias was accompanied by his son, to whom he had given the name
of Aquarius--flattering himself that he would, in the process of time,
become a constellation among the stars of ichthyological science. What
charitable female had lent him the mould in which this son was cast,
no one pretended to know; and, as he never dropped the most distant
allusion to Aquarius's mother, some of the wags of London maintained
that he had received the favours of a mermaid, and that the scientific
perquisitions which kept him always prowling about the sea-shore, were
directed by the less philosophical motive of regaining his lost love.