sentences:  The alchemist Paracelsus's treatise "Liber de Nymphis" (1566) spawned the idea that the water elemental (or water sprite) could acquire an immortal soul through marriage with a human; this led to the writing of De la Motte Fouqué's novella "Undine", and eventually to the most famous literary mermaid tale of all, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid".A world-famous statue of the Little Mermaid, based on Andersen's fairy tale, has been in Copenhagen, Denmark since August 1913, with copies in 13 other locations around the world–almost half of them in North America.The conception of the "siren" as both a mermaid-like creature and part bird-like persisted in Byzantine Greece for some time.