240 NOTES ON PISH AND PISHING. 



Kupris, Venus — the Goddess of Love — whose name was 

 applied to the carp on account of its fecundity. I must 

 confess I think the idea of the carp being " Venus's own 

 fish " is pretty enough, and I am satisfied with the ety- 

 mology, though I see that the learned Dr. Badham, who 

 delights to dabble in fishy derivations, calls it " con- 

 jectural." He ventures to suggest one of his own, and 

 derives Kuprinos from the Greek Tcupeiron, a " marshy 

 weed," on the ground that the carp has his " latitat among 

 the weeds," and that " his favourite food is in the mud." 

 He urges that the common vernacular designations of 

 burbaro and bulbaro, by which the carp is known in cer- 

 tain Italian districts at the present time, give countenance 

 to this conjecture ; but it is not, to my mind, at all a 

 reasonable one. He then goes on to discuss the origin of 

 the word " carp," which is found in some form or other 

 in almost all European languages, such as earpe in French, 

 Jcarpfe in German, carpa in Spanish, &c. ; and objects to 

 the suggestion that the word is in reality the same as 

 cyprinus and kuprinos, with a slight change and inter- 

 change of letters. Here, again, I venture to differ from 

 the learned ichthyologist and etymologist ; and I fully 

 believe that in calling our fish a " carp " we are per- 

 petuating the old tradition, that it is " Yenus's Fish." 

 Another conjecture, that " carp " is derived from the 

 Latin carpere, to " seize " or " snatch," based on the 

 ground "quod semen maris ore carpens parit" — maris 

 being the genitive of mas, " the male " — I need hardly 

 say will not hold water ; nor will the notion that the fish 

 " greedily seizes " the bait help us in the matter, for, as 

 a matter of fact, he is a painfully shy biter, as most 

 anglers know. 



