FISHES IN RELIGION. 37 



other, been employed in catching their favourite fish. If 

 one of this kind were found in a net full of others, the 

 whole draught was set at liberty rather than take captive a 

 single oxyrhinchus. The people of Syene, again, regarded 

 the phagrus as the herald of the rising Nile, and as such 

 abstained from it. This eel gave its name to Phagriopolis, 

 another to Latapolis, while Elephantine venerated the 

 mseotis, a silurian. But fishes proper are of frequent 

 occurrence in Egyptian sculpture, and among the articles 

 placed with the dead were very often small effigies in metal 

 and clay of the fish-form ; while dead fish of the sacred 

 species were buried with as much ceremony as the cats, 

 ibises, crocodiles, and other creatures that the Children of 

 the Pharaohs worshipped. 



These Egyptian fish were not of course totems in the 

 proper sense ; for the primitive man performs an act of 

 positive sacrifice when he devotes to the religious tribal 

 idea the best fish of the waters, and thenceforward abstains 

 from eating them, whereas the Egyptians shabbily denied 

 themselves only the refuse. They made that sacred which 

 they could not eat. For it is an interesting fact that all 

 the evidence we have on the point strongly tends to the 

 suspicion that the pagan gods were put off by the priests 

 with the very worst of the fish. If a species was poisonous, 

 or belonged to a class that was generally unwholesome, it 

 was declared " sacred " ; the Church thus exerting its in- 

 fluence to prevent only that being eaten which was already, 

 in their opinion, unfit for food. In the Mosaic prohibitions 

 we find that fish without scales and fins were unclean, the 

 reason probably being that the law-giver had just come up 



i'rom Egypt, where the scaleless fish were taboo in conse- 

 quence of their notorious unwholesomeness. Out of the 

 six species venerated by the ancient Egyptians, two were 



