MYTHS AND LEGENDS 43i 



sufficient to lift small fish to a considerable height, and to 

 transport them and deposit them at some distance from the 

 locahty at which they were picked up. Waterspouts and 

 tornadoes are physically similar phenomena, the former occur- 

 ring over stretches of water or over the ocean, the latter over dry 

 land. In some cases it is believed that the fishes are not only 

 carried up into the rapidly rotating vortex of air that forms 

 the body of the waterspout or tornado, but even right up mto 

 the thunderstorm cloud itself There is a case on record in 

 which a hailstone as large as a hen's egg was observed to fall 

 during a heavy storm at Essen in 1896, contammg a frozen 

 Crucian Carp (Carassius) about forty millimetres m length, 

 indicating that the fish must not only have entered the cloud 

 but have been lifted to the very considerable height necessary 

 for the formation of hail. Occasionally, the fish mvolved are of 

 larger size, and at Jelalpur, in India, a specimen^ has been 

 described as falUng with others, which was about "one cubit 

 in length and weighed more than six pounds." Falls in Europe 

 have included Herrings, Sprats, Trout, Smelts, Pike, Minnows, 

 Perch, Sand Eels, and Sticklebacks, and the small red fishes 

 mentioned in the Irish account quoted above were probably 

 of the latter species. i_ r j 



The Bibhcal story of the Miraculous Draught, to be tound 

 in the twenty-first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, 

 will be famihar to all, and an American ichthyologist, Mr. 

 E. W. Gudger, has quite recently pointed out that this seemingly 

 miraculous phenomenon is capable of a perfectly normal and 

 rational explanation in the fight of modern research on the 

 habits of the fishes to be found in the Lake of Tiberias or Galilee. 

 These fishes are chiefly of the family Cichlidae, and occur in 

 huo-e numbers in the lake, habitually swimming at or near 

 the surface of the water. Writing on the habits of the commonest 

 species (Tilapia galilaea), Canon Tristram observes: "I have 

 seen them in shoals of over an acre in extent, so closely packed 

 that it seemed impossible for them to move, and with their 

 dorsal fins above the water, giving at a distance the appearance 

 of a tremendous shower pattering on one spot of the surface 

 of the glassy lake. They are taken both in boats and from the 

 shore by nets run deftly round, and enclosing what one may 

 call a solid mass at one swoop, and very often the net breaks." 

 Now the procedure of the lake fishermen at the present day, as 

 described by Dr. Masterman in his account of the inland 

 fisheries of Gahlee, is as follows:— a man is stationed on the 



