1 8 ' FISHES OF FANCY. 



the inspiration of Moses, and the Biblical narrative of 

 Noah's arrangements had been anticipated by some 

 centuries. 



In the later myths — those, for instance, of Greece and 

 Rome — though they, too, reach back by similarities both 

 of design and detail to a distant past, fishes retain their 

 prominence. The distant, mystical ocean was then an 

 object of awful reverence. The nearer seas were go- 

 verned by powerful but kindly divinities. But both alike 

 were populous with strange fishes, and romantic with 

 legends. 



The chief water-myth was that of Aphrodite. Sometimes 

 she springs, a perfect goddess, from the sea itself ; at others 

 fish roll on to the shore an Qgg, from which, a dove brood- 

 ing on it, the mother of Love is born. Later on, she and 

 her son Eros, to escape the tumult of giant-beleaguered 

 Olympus, hide in the Euphrates in the form of fish ; and 

 yet again we find the goddess taking the starry Pisces 

 under her protection. So, too, Athor, the Egyptian 

 Venus, had been a fish ; and so, too, Derceto, the Syrian 

 love-nymph. In the Puranic legend a fish receives the 

 love-god, and assists him to espouse Maya. 



In the limited space of a handbook — even if it were 

 proper to its object — it would be impossible to enumerate 

 all the fish-myths of the so-called classical period, and 

 I will therefore select only those that seem to me 

 typical of the four classes into which the whole group 

 themselves. 



As essentially Greek in brightness of conception is the 

 myth of the philanthropic dolphin. It was pre-eminently 

 the friend of man, and a creature of gladness. Whenever 

 needed it was present, and the stories of its lending itself 

 as the vehicle of gods and nymphs, poets and schoolboys, 



