98 THE DOLPHIN—ICHTHYOPHAGI—THE TUNNY 
feed on them from year’s end to year’s end. The cattle will 
also eat these fish just out of the water.’ 
Not dissimilar is the account given! some twelve centuries 
earlier of the people of Stobera in India. ‘‘ They clothe them- 
selves in the skins of very large fishes, and their cattle taste 
like fish and eat extraordinary things: for they are fed upon 
fish, just as in Cairo the flocks are fed on figs.”’ 
In strong contrast with these Ichthyophagi other races 
abstained entirely, not as the Egyptians and Jews partially, 
from fish. Of such were the Syrians, either because they wor- 
shipped fish as gods or held them as sacred,? or because (as 
asserted by Anaximander) of the inhumanity, since mankind 
originally were born from fish, of devouring one’s fathers and 
mothers. 
Surprising, indeed, sounds the statement of Plutarch that 
among total abstainers in early times were the more religious- 
minded of the Greeks, among whom later the eating of fish 
developed into a passionate, almost cat-like, devotion. Invested 
though the abstentions, total or other, were with divine origin 
or armed with divine sanction, the root reason of all of them 
rested, I believe, on the terror of skin-diseases, attributable to a 
1 Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, III. 48. 
? Xenophon, Anab., I. 4; Cicero, de nat. Deorum, III. 39; Ovid, Fasti, 
II. 473-4. 
I Rety different was the behaviour of the first generation of Man (who 
according to Philo’s Translation of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, prep. 
ev., I. 9, 5), “ consecrated the plants shooting out of the earth, judged them 
gods, worshipped them, but yet lived upon them” (Cf. de Brosses, Culte 
des Dieux Fétiches). In Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8. 4, Nestor states that “the 
priests of Poseidon never eat fish, for Poseidon is called the Generator; and 
the race of Hellen sacrificed to him as the first father, imagining, as likewise 
did the Syrians, that Man rose from a liquid substance, and therefore they 
worship a fish as of the same production and breeding as themselves, being 
in this matter more happy in their philosophy than Anaximander: for he 
says that fish and men were not produced in the same substance, but that 
men were first produced in fishes and, when they were grown up and able to 
fend for themselves, were thrown out and so lived on the land. Therefore, 
as fire devours its parents, that is the matter out of which it was first kindled, 
so Anaximander, asserting that fish were our common parents, condemneth 
our feeding upon them.” The belief in the descent of man from fish exists 
in the present day among the Ponapians of the Caroline Islands, and elsewhere 
(J. G. Frazer, Folk Love tn the Old Testament (London, 1918), i. 40). As regards 
the changes in our development which make the whole world kin, Empedocles, 
(Kaapyol, frag. 117, Diels) sings, 
H8n ydp mor” eye yevduny Kotpds re Kdpy Te 
Oduvos 7° oiwyds Te kal EEados EAdoTos ixOds, 
