FISHES IN ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY. 15 



Greek spirit could. And how bright their sea-life was, 

 with its goddesses that sailed about in shells, and gods 

 that rode on dolphins ; when mariners saw chariots drawn 

 by sea-horses, hurrying along to scenes of submarine 

 revelry, and heard in the bays the music bubbling up from 

 the sea-kings' palaces ! In the beautiful Greek waters 

 were troops of happy people, and it seems no hard fate 

 for Pompilus or for Nais, or any of the other men or 

 women, who for their misdemeanours were condemned to 

 the livery of scales, to have been banished in the Golden 

 Age of fishes from the solid earth to the subaqueous regions 

 where Neptune held his glad court, and Amphitrite her 

 revels. And then came those grand old thinking men, 

 trying, out of a chaos of superstitions to deduce scientific 

 order, and yet preserving for us in their pages all those 

 credulities which now enable us to retrace the paths of 

 human thought, and locate the sources of human beliefs. 



In the Solar Myth the fish has been made, like every- 

 thing else, to play a prominent part : the fair-haired and 

 silvery moon, in the ocean of night, is the little gold-fish 

 and the little silver-fish which announces the rainy season, 

 the autumn, the deluge ; out of the cloudy, nocturnal or 

 wintry ocean comes forth the sun, the pearl lost in the sea, 

 which the gold or silver fish brings out. The little gold-fish 

 and the luminous pike, like the moon, expands or contracts, 

 and in this form, as expanding or contracting, the god 

 Vishnu or Hari (which means fair-haired or golden) refers 

 now to the sun, now to the moon, Vishnu having taken the 

 form of the gold-fish. But the commixture of accidental 

 coincidences and incongruous objects which go to make up 

 the myth that Gubernatis sets forth in its most bewildering 

 aspect, has in itself material for volumes, and it is enough 

 here to say, that those who go to any work on the subject 



