38 FISHES OF FANCY. 



quite unfit for food and a third not worth the eating. The 

 identity of the remainder has never been established, but 

 the chances are that they belonged to sorts that no 

 Egyptian would have eaten even if it had been permitted. 



This process of hygienic selection does not extend, 

 obviously, to the rest of the animal world, and yet the 

 theory, if tested with beasts and birds, would, I venture to 

 think, be found more, widely applicable than might be 

 expected. Another reason for forbidding certain animals 

 as food was of course their being more useful in other 

 ways ; but as this does not concern fish (whose only uses 

 are after death), it appears to me that the only system 

 on which the priests of the oldest times the thinking 

 men of the community distributed the honours of conse- 

 cration among the finny tribes was selection by common 

 sense. 



I have now referred to fish that were not eaten 

 because they were sacred, and to fish that were sacred 

 because they were not eatable. There still, however, re- 

 mains the fish which were both sacred and eaten. Leaving 

 the Graeco-Roman affectation of consecration out of the 

 question, we find in India, where the fish holds a place of 

 the highest importance in the religious system, a fish diet 

 universal. The Ruhoo, bearing on its back three goddesses, 

 personifies the junction of the three sacred rivers at 

 Prayaga,* "the confluence," one of the holiest spots in 

 India, where the Ganges and the Jumna combine with the 

 mystic Saraswati that is supposed to flow underground to 

 meet them here. Yet this fish is one of the staples of the 

 food of a large proportion of the citizens of Prayaga. As 

 a solitary fish, Vishnu filled the primaeval ocean, and as a 

 fish he rescued the Ark from the Deluge. 



* Allahabad. 



