98 THE DOLPHIN— ICHTHYOPHAGI— THE TUNNY 



feed on them from year's end to year's end. The cattle will 

 also eat these fish just out of the water." 



Not dissimilar is the account given ^ some twelve centuries 

 earlier of the people of Stobera in India. " They clothe them- 

 selves in the skins of very large fishes, and their cattle taste 

 like fish and eat extraordinary things : for they are fed upon 

 fish, just as in Cairo the flocks are fed on figs." 



In strong contrast with these Ichthyophagi other races 

 abstained entirely, not as the Egyptians and Jews partially, 

 from fish. Of such were the Syrians, either because they wor- 

 shipped fish as gods or held them as sacred, 2 or because (as 

 asserted by Anaximander) of the inhumanity, since mankind 

 originally were born from fish, of devouring one's fathers and 

 mothers. 3 



Surprising, indeed, sounds the statement of Plutarch that 

 among total abstainers in early times were the more religious- 

 minded of the Greeks, among whom later the eating of fish 

 developed into a passionate, almost cat-like, devotion. Invested 

 though the abstentions, total or other, were with divine origin 

 or armed with divine sanction, the root reason of all of them 

 rested, I believe, on the terror of skin-diseases, attributable to a 



1 Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius ofTyana, III. 48. 



2 Xenophon, Anab., I. 4; Cicero, de nat. Deorum, III. 39; Ovid, Fasti, 

 II. 473-4. 



3 Very different was the behaviour of the first generation of Man (who 

 according to Philo's Translation of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, prcep. 

 ev., I. 9, 5), " consecrated the plants shooting out of the earth, judged them 

 gods, worshipped them, but yet Hved upon them " (Cf. de Brosses, Culte 

 des bieux Fetiches). In Plutarch, Symp., Will. 8. 4, Nestor states that " the 

 priests of Poseidon never eat fish, for Poseidon is called the Generator ; and 

 the race of Hellen sacrificed to him as the first father, imagining, as likewise 

 did the Syrians, that Man rose from a liquid substance, and therefore they 

 worship a fish as of the same production and breeding as themselves, being 

 in this matter more happy in their philosophy than Anaximander : for he 

 says that fish and men were not produced in the same substance, but that 

 men were first produced in fishes and, when they were grown up and able to 

 fend for themselves, were thrown out and so lived on the land. Therefore, 

 as fire devours its parents, that is the matter out of which it was first kindled, 

 so Anaximander, asserting that fish were our common parents, condemneth 

 our feeding upon them." The belief in the descent of man from fish exists 

 in the present day among the Ponapians of the Caroline Islands, and elsewhere 

 (J. G. Frazer, Folk Lore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), i. 40). As regards 

 the changes in our development which make the whole world kin, Empedocles, 

 {KaOapfxoi, frag. 1 1 7, Diels) sings, 



^5?? yap itot' c'^o) yfv6fir)v Kovp6i re Kupri rt 

 Qijxvus T olo)v6s T( Kal 6|oAoj eAAuTToy IxOvs. 



