FISHES OF FANCY. 



CHAPTER I. 



PRIMITIVE FISH-BELIEFS. 



The loss of Solomon's work on Fish a possible misfortune — Reticence 

 in Holy Writ as to Fish — Even St. Peter does not identify his 

 Fishes — The First Fishers — Dignities of Fishes and their Antiquity 

 — How they chose Leviathan king, and how the Monarchy is now 

 a RepubHc — Individual Fishes of Honour and of Disrepute — That 

 the Sea is a duplicate of the Earth, an error ; but resemblances 

 not to be despised — That Birds were once Fish — Romance of Fact 

 — Are not the Popular Ideas about Fishes prejudiced by error ? — 

 What Fishes might think of us. 



That the world sustained a great loss in the destruction 

 of Solomon's work on Fishes may be accepted as beyond 

 dispute, for let the scientific attainments of the sumptuous 

 builder have been what they might, there can be no doubt 

 of it, Solomon, who was of an artistic kind, would have 

 preserved to posterity a vast quantity of old-world nonsense, 

 possibly even of antediluvian facts, which is now hopelessly 

 lost to us ; and except Solomon, no other personage of 

 Holy Writ has expatiated on the subject of fishes. We 

 have no scriptural recognition of any great fisher " before 

 the Lord." Indeed, the untranslated Bible is singularly 

 reticent on the subject, for it does not specify a single fish. 

 Tobit's fish and Jonah's fish, the fishes of the Psalms and 

 of the New Testament, are spoken of only generically, and 

 even when the Lawgiver is enumerating the things which 



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