PRIMITIVE FISH-BELIEFS. n 



melodious gongs. In India I have seen them called up 

 out of the muddy depths of the river at Dholpore by 

 the ringing of a hand-bell ; and from the abbey in Bel- 

 gium where the tame carp answer at once to the whistle 

 of the monks who feed them, right away to Otaheite 

 where the chiefs have pet eels which they whistle to the 

 surface, the same belief in the sympathy of fish with 

 musical sounds will on enquiry be found prevailing. 

 " Dull as a mullet " was a Roman proverb, yet the very 

 men who quoted it prided themselves on the docility, 

 sensitiveness to sound, and personal attachments of their 

 favourite mullets. This fish too, as it happens, was conse- 

 crated to Diana the huntress, as it was supposed to hunt 

 the sea-hare, and if any one of the Roman divinities was 

 averse to dulness, it was surely the high-spirited Diana. 



I am inclined, therefore, to think that the finned folk 

 have been somewhat calumniated. A grudge, it is pos- 

 sible, has been borne against the fish, under the idea that 

 they escaped the Deluge. Thus Whiston, in his philo- 

 sophical Romance of the Deluge, surmises that the fish 

 livinsf in a cool element were more correct in their lives 

 than the beasts and birds of the sun-lit land, and were 

 therefore spared from the destruction of the primitive world. 

 But it is extremely improbable that the fish did really 

 escape the ruin of the Deluge. If so, it must have been 

 some of the deep-sea forms only, so that envious deprecia- 

 tion of the marine world on this account would seem to be 

 gratuitous. Yet the very word fish itself has come, by some 

 obliquity of reasoning, to signify an object of doubtful 

 character or absurd appearance, and one-half the creatures 

 of the world are treated as a joke by the other half. 

 Beasts are regarded with deference, birds with admiration, 

 but fish are laughed at as absurdities. 



