PRIMITIVE FISH-BELIEFS. 9 



our terrestrial forests — but what a thought ! Imagine, in 

 the gloom of a forest, coming upon a whale on legs ! 



Indeed, it is hardly necessary to go to fable for wonders, 

 for the actual natural world of fishes is a very wilderness 

 of marvels. They come out of the water and migrate in 

 companies across meadows ; they wander along river-banks, 

 hunting for terrestrial insects, unfairly trespassing on the 

 grounds of the lizard and land-bird ; they climb up trees ; 

 are met with travelling along hot and dusty gravel roads 

 under the midday sun ;* have been seen thrown up alive 

 from volcanoes in water that was only two degrees below 

 boiling point.t So the wonders of fish-land, the real world 

 of fishes, is as startling and as marvellous as the fictions of 

 mythology itself, and we need go to no Islands of the 

 Pescadores, nor cruise on the bewitched shores of Calypso, 

 to meet with abundant matter for astonishment. 



In character, they range through every variety of tem- 

 perament, from the gentle carp, that in Java and else- 

 where are tamed into the playfulness and familiarity of 

 dormice or caged birds, or the Adonis, "darling of the 

 sea," to the dog-fish, that are cruel and fierce beyond all 

 mammalian comparison. It is true that the Zulus to this 

 day cut flesh out of a living beast, and that other savages 

 do the same ; and in a legend of New Zealand we read 

 how a man used to take occasional snacks out of a pet 

 whale. But what episode is there in all human knowledge 

 more terrible than the manner of the death of those whales 

 which the dog-fish follow for days, and days, and days, 

 living upon them as they go ? Was ever a death more 

 awful, or cruelty more dreadful ? Who, again, has not 

 applauded Trinculo's excellent phrase of an "ancient and 

 fish-like smell," or ever thought of the odour of fish as 



* Tcnnant's ' Ceylon.' t Humboldt. 



