230 FISH IN SACRIFICES—VIVARIA—ARCHIMEDES 
centuries, at any rate, its valli or breeding grounds have been 
renowned. Ariosto sings its speciality : 
“La Citta che in mezzo alle piscose 
Paludi del P6, téme ambe le foci.” 
Tasso hands it down as the place where the fish— 
“finds itself within a prison swamp 
Nor can escape, for that seraglio 
Is aye to entrance wide, to exit barred.” 
At the present day over twelve hundred tons of fish, eight 
hundred of them eels, are annually captured at Comacchio.! 
Since the above was printed, new and interesting evidence 
of the importance of fish, not only as an economic, but also as 
a hygienic, factor in the nation’s prosperity has been furnished 
by Prof. J. A. Thomson in his lecture before the Royal 
Institution, January 6, 1921. 
He traced a connection between the decline of Greece and 
a shortage of little fishes. There was strong reason to believe 
that one of the causes for the decay of ‘“‘the glory that was 
Greece ’’ was that malaria was brought into the State. 
The little creature, which caused malaria, lived on the 
mosquito by whom it was carried. The mosquito spent its 
larval life in the fresh waters. Little fish were the enemy of 
the mosquito—particularly the fish known as ‘‘ millions ’’— 
which consumed the pest at a great rate. 
The professor suggested, therefore, that what had happened 
in Greece was that there had not been enough little fish to 
keep the mosquitos in check. Because of this, malaria had 
been brought into the country, and that plague helped, if it 
did not cause, the destruction of the wonderful civilisation of 
Greece. 
1 Faber, op. cit., 86. Cf. Revue Contemporaine, June 30 and July 15, 1854, 
where the fisheries at Comacchio are described at length. 
