WHY SOME SACRED ?—TOTEMISM 329 
But Robinson, disagreeing with Robertson Smith and Frazer 
in their conception of Totemism, denies that these fish were 
totems in any proper sense. Primitive man performs an act 
of positive sacrifice when he devotes to the religious tribal idea 
the best fish of the waters, and thenceforth abstains from 
eating them; whereas the Egyptians shabbily denied them- 
selves only the refuse. They made that sacred which they 
could not eat. All the evidence tends to the suspicion that 
the gods were put off by the priests with the very worst of the 
fish. Ifa species were poisonous or belonged to a class that was 
unwholesome, it was straightway declared sacred.! 
Speaking from my own experience and purely on palatal 
grounds, had I been High Priest I should have banned nearly 
all Nile fishes for their insipidity and muddiness. Tastes, 
of course, differ. The Lates is passable, but the Oxyrhynchus 
attracts no opsophagist devotees, which is probably the fault of 
“ The Creator of all things good ” in either the temperature of 
his water or the character of their food, since a cousin, O. 
mormyrus, geographically not far removed, is ranked by 
epicures as delicious.? 
The reason assigned by the priests to Plutarch for the- 
abstention from and local veneration of the Oxyrhynchus, 
Phagrus, and Lepidotus possesses, whatever its truth, the charm 
of an antiquity reaching back to the dawn of goddom. 
After the slaying of Osiris by Typho, Isis made unwearied 
search for his body. But she could never recover his private 
part, for it had been flung into the Nile, and eaten by the 
Lepidotus, the Phagrus, and the Oxyrhynchus: “ fish which of 
all others, for this reason, the Egyptians have in more especial 
avoidance. But Isis made its effigies, and so consecrated the 
phallos, for which the Egyptians to this day observe a festival.” 3 
The same author vouches for the veneration of the Oxyrhyn- 
chus, as shown by the people of the city named after that fish ; 
“they will not touch any kind of fish that have been taken 
with an angle, for they are afraid lest perhaps the hook may be 
1 Op. cit., p. 37. 
2 The Mormyri, which number some 100 species, are peculiar to Africa, 
3 De Iside et Osiride, 18. 
