96 THE DOLPHIN— ICHTHYOPHAGI— THE TUNNY 



did the legend continue to be held that even up to the third 

 century B.C. the lasians struck coins with the device of a youth 

 swimming beside a dolphin, which he clasps with one arm.^ 



Like Scylla, who " fishes for dolphins and whatso greater 

 beast she may anywhere take," both the Thracians and Byzan- 

 tines, despite the enormous annual revenues derived by the 

 latter from their fisheries, caught and ate the Dolphin, and for 

 so-doing are branded as impious and barbarian. 2 The more 

 ancient Byzantine coins show a cow standing on a dolphin, 

 which perhaps symbolises the heifer crossing the Bosporus. 3 



The ancient literature of the East 

 also portrays Dolphins [Qi gumdras) 

 as the ready helpers of man, in rescu- 

 ing lives, in drawing ships, etc.^ The 

 inhabitants of Isle Sainte Marie, near 

 Madagascar, even now never harm 

 or eat the fish, holding it as sacred, 

 because they believe it rendered 

 signal service to some ancestor.^ 



Herodotus mentions a tribe living 

 round Lake Prasias, who in dwellings 

 and food resemble the Wolga folk, 

 and early Continental and English 

 Lake-dwellers : — 

 " Platforms supplied by tall piles stand in the middle of 

 the lake, which are approached from the land by a narrow 



THE DOLPHIN AND THE BOY 

 OF lASOS. 



From Coin, British Museum, 

 Cat. PI. 21. 7. 



^ Brit. Mus. Cat., pi. XXI. 7. B. V. Head, Historia Numorum, 620 f. 

 (ed. 2, Oxford, 191 1). In Plutarch's {de Sol. Anim., 36) the lad was thrown 

 from the fish's back by a terrible shower of hail and was drowned. 



- Oppian, hal., V. 521 ff. 



^ B. V. Head, op. cit. p. 266 fJ. As an emblem of the sea the dolphin 

 is very general, from the rude sculpturings of Etruscan sarcophagi, the later 

 mural adornments at Pompeii, down to the paintings of the walls of the 

 Vatican by Raphael. In all, the striking dissemblancy to the actual dolphin 

 of natural history can be remarked at a glance. In the case of Raphael, 

 liowever, it must be remembered that the designs are modelled on the classical 

 decorations which were discovered in the Baths of Titus, where the Dolphin 

 had been with propriety introduced as a marine symbol (Moule, Heraldry 

 of Fish, p. 8). 



* De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), ii. 336. 



* Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910), ii. 636. W. A. Cork, 

 op. cit., p. 96, states that the Karayds of the Amazon Valley, although eating 

 nearly^every other fish, abstain from the Dolphin. 



