i 9 8 SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



head of Nero, and on that of Fig. n the head of his 

 grandmother Agrippina.* 



From the very earliest period of history, then, the 

 conjoined human and fish form was known to every 

 generation of men. It was presented to their sight in 

 childhood by sculptures and pictures, and was a conspicuous 

 object in their religious worship. By the lapse of time its 

 original import was lost and debased ; and, from being 

 an emblem and symbol, it came to be accepted as the 



* It is worthy of note that the fish was also* adopted as an emblem 

 by the early Christians, and was frequently sculptured on their tombs 

 as a private mark or sign of the faith in which the person there 

 interred had died. It alluded to the letters which composed the 

 Greek word lx#vs ("a fish") forming an anagram, the initials 

 of words which conveyed the following sentiment : Irjaovs, Jesus ; 

 Xpio-ros-, Christ ; Geov, of God ; Yfos, Son ; Somjp, Saviour. But it 

 doubtless bore, also, the older meaning of " preservation " and " re- 

 production," of which the fish was the symbol, and betokened a belief 

 in a future resurrection, as Noah was preserved to dwell in, and 

 populate, a new world. In * Sea Monsters Unmasked,' page 55 

 [page 381 of this volume] I gave a figure, copied by permission from the 

 Illustrated London News, of a rough sculpture in the Roman catacombs, 

 of Jonah being disgorged by a sea-monster. Near to it was found, on 

 another Christian tomb, one of these designs of the " fish ; " and it is 

 not a little curious that, whereas the animal depicted as casting forth 

 Jonah is not a whale, but a sea-serpent, or dragon, the ichtheus in this 

 instance is apparently not a fish, but a seal. 



FIG. 12. CHRISTIAN SYMBOL. From the Catacombs at Rome. 



The article referred to appeared in the Illustrated London News 

 of February 3rd, 1872, and the woodcut (Fig. 12), an electrotype of 

 which was most kindly presented to me by the proprietors of that 

 paper, was one of the sketches that accompanied it. 



