276 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 
we are enjoined to eat fish, of which, it must be remembered, 
Aphrodite was a patron goddess. 
As regards Maunday Thursday, Robinson writes: ‘‘ One 
of the annual Church disbursements up to the end of the 
sixteenth century was for herrings, ‘ved and white.’ Let us 
hope that those who in pious observation of Christian ordinances 
thus charged themselves with phosphorus were not aware that 
they were simply perpetuating the worship of Venus.!_ Friday, 
again, is dies Veneris, and fish, her own symbol, is therefore 
appropriate for the day.”’ 
Of the making and explaining of symbols in early and 
medieval times there is no end. The monkish mind, perhaps 
owing to environment and fasting, found this a congenial and 
pleasant pursuit. 
Among the books on this subject, Mundus Symbolicus, 
although, or perhaps because, published in 1681, attracts me 
most, not merely by its fulness of information and of quotation 
from classical, Patristic, and medieval literature—it is a good 
competitor with Burton’s Anatomy for Collectanea—but also 
by the number and naiveté of its lemmata, or appropriate 
apophthegms, which appeal alike to one’s ignorance and one’s 
humour. Of 737 pages of the volume before me 43 concern 
themselves solely with fish, and provide delightful browsing.? 
The object and practice of Picinelli, from whose J/ Mondo 
Simbolico Erath makes the Latin translation, is to examine 
into the habits, real or alleged, of each fish, and deduce, as was 
the frequent custom of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, from its delinquencies or virtues a moral lesson or 
lessons. 
Thus the lemma, “ Fallacis fructus amoris,” not inaptly 
summarises the amatory character of the Sargus, as indicated 
1 P. Robinson, International Fisheries Exhibition (London, 1883), Part III. 
p. 43. “‘ The representations of the Virgin in a canopy or vesica piscis are 
supposed to have a specially Christian significance: if they have any at all, 
it is a very heathenish one.” 
2 Mundus Symbolicus, a rare folio, of which two editions, 1681 and 1694, 
exist, is a translation of JJ Mondo Simbolico (written by Picinelli Filippi, and 
published at Milan 1653, 1669, and 1680), made by Aug. Erath. Cf. Trésor 
des livres raves et precieux, tom. v. (Dresde, 1859-69), p. 282. The Bodleian 
possesses only the 1694 edition of Mundus Symbolicus, while apparently the 
British Museum lacks both. 
