He studied the regeneration of the tail fins of fish at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and in 1948 he became the second black scientist to earn membership in the Marine Biological Laboratory Corporation, an organization established in 1888 for scientists who worked in the laboratory's educational or research programs.
He was represented as human down to his waist, with the tail of a fish.
In reality, the mermaid had been created by sewing the tail of a fish to a monkey's upper body.
Mermaid, masculine merman, a fabled marine creature with the head and upper body of a human being and the tail of a fish.
"Some people are literally taking scissors and cutting off the tail of a fish to make it fit into a certain category," Mr. Hegar said.
A passenger gazing from the window of the veranda cafe saw what seemed to be the tail of a fish raising "a streak of froth" on the starboard side.
The girls looked blankly past this explanation, but they were intrigued by one of the small prizes of the show: a nineteenth-century composite skeleton — a monkey skull attached to the tail of a fish — of a kind called a Feejee Mermaid, which may conceivably be the very same one that P. T. Barnum showed at his museum here, back in the nineteenth century.
In many lower animals this connection between organs of balance and eyes is very rigid; thus, one may move the tail of a fish, and its eyes will move reflexly.
The whole tail of the fish is essentially a chain of such units in which the phase of muscular contraction at any one link is slightly ahead of that of the next posterior unit and slightly behind that of the next anterior unit.
A multi-millionaire grandfather pretending to be a Street-Fighting Man is not unlike the five-year-old boy whom Barnum passed off as a dwarf, or his famous "Fiji Mermaid" (the upper half of a monkey attached to the tail of a fish).
