HAUPT— TOBIT'S BLINDNESS AND SARA'S HYSTERIA. 93 



Some commentators believe that the fish was a pike (RB 457'', 

 1. 3) or a shark, or a whale, or a crocodile, or a hippopotamus. 

 Large specimens of pike may attain a length of nearly 7 feet and a 

 weight of nearly 80 lbs. They are said to attack foxes and small 

 dogs, and snap at the hands and feet of human beings. Some 

 species of sharks enter the mouths of large rivers. The carcharias 

 Gangeticus occurs frequently high up in the large rivers of India; 

 but there are no whales, hippopotami, or crocodiles in the Tigris. 

 According to the Arabian cosmographer Kazwini, who died in 1283, 

 the smell of smoke of a crocodile's liver cures epilepsy, and its dung 

 and gall cure leucoma. Some exegetes think that the fish symbolizes 

 the pagan empire endeavoring to seize what portions it could of the 

 pious Dispersion (Simpson, p. 186). 



The Book of Tobit is, of course, not historical. Luther said. If 

 it be fiction, it is a truly beautiful, wholesome, and profitable fiction, 

 the work of a gifted poet. It is a religious novel written by a 

 Persian Jew about 167 B.C. The accounts of the cures of Tobias's 

 blindness and Sara's hysteria are not as accurate as our modern 

 medical reports, but if a contemporary novelist introduced some 

 allusions to the new rejuvenating operation suggested by Dr. Stei- 

 nach, of Vienna,' or the transplantation of the thyroid gland of a 

 monkey for the cure of idiocy, recently performed in Chicago, there 

 would probably be some inaccuracies. We still speak of biliousness, 

 colds in the head or on tJie lungs; we call conjunctivitis, which is 

 caused by the Morax-Axenfeld bacillus or by the Koch-Weeks 

 microbe, a cold in the eye, and we often read in the daily papers 

 that some man died of acute indigestion. 



The. author of the Book of Tobit may have heard of a wise man 

 who had cured an attack of hystero-epilepsy by the fumes of the 

 liver of a dolphin, placed on the embers of incense containing 

 asafetida. He may also have known of some cases in which white 

 spots in the eyes had disappeared after the application of charred 

 incense mixed with the gall of a fish or small cetacean.'* The man 



■^ Ligation of deferent canal ; cf. Knud Sand, Moderne experimentelle 

 Sexualforschung, besonders die letzten Arbeiten Steinachs (" Verjiingung") 

 p. 20 (Bonn, 1920). 



8 The Baltimore Sun, July 9, 1921 (p. i, cols. 4, 5) stated that Charles 



