416 FORBIDDEN FISH—NETTING—VIVARIA 
The Jews acquired no intimate knowledge of the ichthyic 
branch of natural history. Although acquainted with some 
of the names given by the Egyptians and Alexandrians to 
different species (Josephus compares a fish found in the sea of 
Gennesaret to the Coracixus 1) they adopted no similar method 
of distinguishing them, or any classification beyond the broad 
division of clean and unclean. The biological knowledge 
concerning fish shown in the Talmud was of a very primitive 
order, not merely in regard to embryology and propagation, but 
also as to hatching.? 
It does, indeed, require the firmly-shut eye of faith to 
conceive that the fish of Raphael’s great Madonna del Pesce, 
which scarcely weighs two pounds and is carried on a string 
by the youth Tobias, can have been to him an object of danger 
and terror, or that it “ leaped out of the river and would have 
swallowed him ’’ had it not been for the Angel’s command to 
seize the brute (Tobit vi. 2, 3). Raphael’s cartoon is another 
instance of the untrammelled liberty of the Italian artist. 
Most of the fishes are mere nondescript piscine forms of artistic 
fancy, but two are certainly of the Skate or Ray family, which 
is never found in fresh water ! 
Then, again, how oddly Botticelli and other painters 
misconceive their man-eating fish, which must have been a 
crocodile strayed from the Indus or the Nile to the waters of 
the Tigris. 
Fortunately Dr. Tristram 3 comes to our aid as regards the 
fresh-water fish of modern, and probably of ancient Palestine. 
Of his forty-three species, only eight are common to the more 
westerly Mediterranean rivers and lakes. Of thirty-six found 
in the Jordan and its affluents, but one occurs in the ordinary 
three to accompany him, that these three were all Fishermen.”" As a contrast 
to the excellent character given to the four fisher Apostles by Walton, a 
learned divine of Worms, J. Ruchard, found it incumbent in 1479 to defend 
Peter from the charge of instituting abstinence from flesh, so that he could 
profitably dispose of his fish! Keller, op. cit., p. 335. 
1B. J., Ill. 10, 18. ‘It is watered by a most fertile fountain. Some 
have thought it to be a vein of the Nile, as it produces the Coracin fish as 
well as that lake does, which is near Alexandria.” 
2 Smith’s Hist. of the Bible (1890), and Singer’s Jewish Encyclopedia, 
V., p. 403, however, mention the Tunny, Herring, Eel, etc. 
3 See, also, E. W. G. Masterman, Studies in Galilee, Chicago, 1909. 
