Itinerario, Vol. 41, No. 3, 507–538. © 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University doi:10.1017/S0165115317000663 “Such Monsters Do Exist in Nature”: Mermaids, Tritons, and the Science of Wonder in Eighteenth-Century Europe VAUGHN SCRIBNER* E-mail:
[email protected] While a thick vein of scepticism marked Enlightenment thinkers’ studies, such investigations cannot be divorced from their concurrent quest to merge the wondrous and the rational. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in philosophers’ investigations of merpeople. Examining European gentlemen’s debates over mermaids and tritons illuminate their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists utilized a wide range of methodologies to critically study these seemingly wondrous creatures and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories—including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference—to understand merpeople’s place in the natural world. By the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers integrated merpeople into their explana- tion of humanity’s origins, thus bringing this phenomenon full circle. Keywords: mermaid, triton, science, Enlightenment, nature. A broadside circulated throughout London in 1795 that announced, “Whereas many have imagined that the History of Mermaids, mentioned by the Authors of Voyages, is fabulous,