&ADEANS AND PLBUEONECTS.' 361 



with daily in the market, but such as offered au acreage 

 of body equal to that of the isle of Qrete. . One of these 

 they would place upon a lordly dish capable of holding 

 a hundred as large. When it was the king's pleasure to 

 have the fish prepared for table, the Sardians and Ly- 

 cians and Mygdonians,. the Cranseans and the Paphians, 

 began to vie with each other in felling timber t© cook it. 

 Then they piled up the forests they had cut down into a 

 vast pyre in circuit equal to a city, and having let a lake 

 into the caldron that was to seethe it, and carried for 

 eight months in succession a hundred daily waggon- 

 loads of salt to season the pot, they kindled the crack- 

 ling mass, and as it flamed up, five galleys, every one of 

 which carried its five banks of rowers complete, cruised 

 round the margin of the caldron sea, and as it bubbled 

 up, issued prompt directions to the crowd below, not to 

 overboil the contents. 



Was not that a noble fish to set before a, king ? 



It is to be regretted that the name of the species is not 

 given by the historian : we can only conjecture, there- 

 fore, fi-om the size, and the trouble taken to prepare it 

 properly, that the individual in question was a rhombus 

 maximus of very large size ! But whilst we admit that 

 this is only hypothesis, we are not so willing to give up 

 Domitian's rhombus, which all the world in our school- 

 boy days agreed to call turbot ; and to debase Juvenal's 

 'beUua peregrina' iuto a vulgar brill.* There is no 

 good reason that we can see for reversing the opinion 

 originally entertained respecting this particular fish in 

 favour of the brill ; and there are some objections against 



* N-o error is innocent, and tlie indirect consequence of this 

 has been to make the fislunongers of Billingsgate and Hunger^ 

 ford 'require the poor invaUd to pay as much for a briU as the 

 wealthy epicure for his turbot. 



