Fish-Monsters and Myths. 1 1 5 



and from a fish-pond (according to Arabic legend) that 

 Moses was rescued by Pharaoh's daughter? When the 

 demons had usurped Solomon's throne, and the monarch 

 was an outcast in his dominions and jeered at as a sort of 

 Perkin Warbeck, a preposterous claimant, a fish found the 

 omnipotent signet-ring, and so enabled the king to reascend 

 his throne. Did they not give their names to a score of 

 cities? Is not fish one of the special foods promised to 

 the faithful in the paradise of the Moslem, with, hard 

 by, that tree from Sinai that yields sauces "appropriate 

 thereto, for them who eat" a kind of paradisiacal 

 cruets. 



In character they range through every variety of tempera- 

 ment, from the gentle carp that in Java and elsewhere are 

 tamed into the playfulness and familiarity of dormice or 

 caged birds, or the Adonis, " darling of the sea," l to the dog- 

 fish, that are cruel and fierce beyond all mammalian com- 

 parison. And what episode is there in all human knowledge 

 more terrible than the manner of the death of those whales 

 which the dog-fish follow for days and days and days, living 

 upon them as they go ? 



Fish are, as a rule, in myths, the stupid persons of the 

 narrative, the foolish folk who are found dancing in the 

 nets just when they should be most serious ; who get caught 

 and beg the fishermen to put them back, u so that we may 

 grow larger and better worth your eating ; " who catch hold 

 of the hook in order to pull the angler into the water; 

 who rush into the net just to make fun of the fishermen, 



1 "There is also," saith the " Compleat Angler," " a fish called by Aliaut 

 the Adonis, or Darling of the Sea, so called because it is a loving and 

 innocent fish, a fish that hurts nothing that hath life, and is at peace with 

 all the numerous inhabitants of that vast watery element ; and truly I 

 think most anglers are so disposed to most of mankind." Wait for the 

 adonis that Marc Antony and Cleopatra used to make those notable fishing- 

 excursions, at once the admiration and the scandal of "surrounding 

 nations." 



