WEST AFRICAN FOLKLORE. 783 



fied, and no more was said ; but all tlie town now knew that the 

 woman was a fish woman. 



Nothing bad happened from this for some time, though the 

 husband had broken his great oath never to mention that his wife 

 and her family were fishes ; but one day a second wife whom the 

 man had taken quarreled with the first wife as wives will quar- 

 rel and she taunted the first wife with being a fish, and laughed 

 at her. The first wife was so much hurt at this that she made up 

 her mind to go back to her family in the sea and become a fish 

 once more. She went to her husband and said : " Twice have you 

 done wrong : first, in refusing to let me go alone to visit my 

 family ; and secondly, in breaking your great oath and revealing 

 my secret, which you swore to keep. I can no longer live in a 

 place where I and my children will be laughed at and put to 

 shame. I will return to my home." 



Her husband endeavored to pacify her, but in vain, for she 

 would not be pacified. He said he would send away the second 

 wife, but still she was not satisfied. He begged and entreated her 

 to stop, but it was all of no use. Then he tried to hold her and 

 keep her by force, but she broke away from him, and running 

 down to the seashore, called to him a last good-by, and plunged 

 into the sea with her youngest child in her arms. After that she 

 was never seen again. Her two elder children remained with 

 their father, and from them is descended the 8arfu-ni-nam * clan, 

 none of whom may ever eat sarfu, for the fish woman was, when 

 in the sea, a fish of that kind. 



Far from finding fault with the mistakes in science which we ohserve in the 

 works of the early Christian exegetists, the Rev. John A. Zahm, of the University 

 of Notre Dame, maintains that " we should ratlier he surprised that tlie errors 

 are so few. They were certainly not more numerous, nor more serious, than 

 those found in the works of the ablest of the professional exponents of the profane 

 science of the period. It were foolish to expect them to know more about geog- 

 rapliy than Eratosthenes and Strabo and Pomponius Mela, who had made a life 

 study of the subject; or to demand of them a more accurate knowledge of astron- 

 omy than was possessed by Hipparchus or Ptolemy; or to suppose that they 

 should have a more precise and a more extended acquaintance with physics and 

 natural history than had Aristotle or Pliny. Such an exaction would be the 

 height of unreason. As well might we find fault with them for not being so well 

 versed in physics as Ampere or Maxwell, or reproach them for knowing less of 

 astronomy than Leverrier or Father Secchi, and less of geograpliy than Hum- 

 boldt, Malte-Brun, or Carl Ritter men whose science was based on the experi- 

 ments and observations of thousands of investigators, and on the accumulated 

 knowledge of well-nigh twenty centuries." 



* Sarfu-ni-nam, " No sarfu flesh " ; literally, " Not to have sarfu flesh." The mrfu is a 

 kind of horse mackerel. 



