may observe that the greater number of the species taken on the lake are rejected by the fishermen, and I have sat with them on the gunwale while they went through their net, and threw out into the sea those that were too small for the market, or were considered unclean. This custom brings out in great force the full bearing of the parable, which is scarcely illustrated by any incident in our English fisheries.

22. FISHING WITH HOOK AND LINE.-Other modes of taking fish in present use at the Holy Land, and alluded. to in Scripture, are by tho hook and line, referred to by Isaiah xix. 8: 66 They that cast angle into the brooks":

and by Habakkuk i. 15; and in the Book of Job xli. 1. The Galilean fisherman also used the hook and line, as we find from Matt. xvii. 27: "Go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up." Hooks were used either as night lines, or with rods, but only baited, as fly-fishing is unknown. Captives are depicted on the Assyrian monuments led away by fishhooks through the noses, as we read in Amos iv. 2: "He will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fish-hooks." So Ezekiel xxix. 4; xxxviii. 4. In Job xli. 2, "Canst thou put a hook in his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?" the reference is not to fishing, but to the keeping alive in tanks, after the

292 FISHING WITH SPEAR-SUCKING FISH--JONAH'S FISH.

Egyptian fashion, fish not required for immediate use, secured by a hook through their gills.

23. FISHING WITH SPEAR.-In the smaller streams and the northern rivers of the Lebanon, the fish spear is much used. It is alluded to in Job xli. 7: "Canst thon fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?"

24. WITH POISON AND BY WEIRS.-Two other modes of taking fish are practised in Palestine, not mentioned in Scripture by poison and by weirs. The first method is very commonly employed on the Lake of Galilee by the poorest classes. Men sit on a rock overhanging the water, on which they scatter crumbs poisoned with vitriol, which are seized by the fish. As soon as they are seen to float on their backs, the men rush into the sea and collect them.

The method by weirs and stake-nets is used near the Kishon, and in some of the northern and western streams. I have also seen them in the Bireh, an affluent of the Jordan. The stake-nets are formed of a sort of canewattle. Among the laws of Joshua, the Rabbis relate, was one forbidding the use of stake-nets in the Sea of Chinnereth (Galilee), for fear of damage to the boats.

25. THE SUCKING FISH.-Among the unclean fishes, the Jews especially named the Cuttle-fish, not, as we know, a fish, but a cephalopod mollusc. This creature is perhaps spoken of in Ezekiel xxix. 4: "I will cause the fish of thy rivers to stick unto thy scales" but more probably the allusion is to the Sucking-fish, or Remora (Echeneis remora, L.), which attaches itself to sharks and other large fish, and the powers of adhesion of which are so great that it is sometimes employed, when secured by a ring, for the purpose of taking turtles, to which it attaches itself in its endeavours to escape, when both are hauled in together.

26. JONAH'S FISH.-No description is given us in the Old Testament of the fish that swallowed Jonah. It is simply said, "The Lord had prepared a great fish" (i. 17). But in the Gospel (Matt. xii. 40) it is translated whale. The Greek word Kros is however used to signify any sea-monster, and must not here be taken for one of the family we call whales. This it could not have been, for the throat of any whale is far too contracted to swallow a man. Nor is it absolutely necessary

to suppose a great fish to have been specially created for the occasion, since the various species of Shark, several of which occur in the Mediterranean, have been repeatedly known to swallow a man whole. The arrangement was alike beyond and above the ordinary course of nature, whether it was an existing fish or a creature specially prepared' that entombed the prophet.

27. TOBIT'S FISH.-It is not easy to ascertain satisfactorily to what fish the Jews referred in the story of Tobit. Certainly the legend of the fish leaping out of the Tigris to attack a man is not founded on any possible habit of any known fish. But it is probable that one of the large Siluride or Sheat-fish is intended, and Bochart refers to Galen and Dioscorides, as prescribing the gall of this fish for an eye-salve.

28. FISH-WORSHIP.-The worship of fish was prevalent among many nations of antiquity, and such idolatry is expressly prohibited in Deut. iv. 18: "The likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth." This form of idolatry probably had a twofold origin; the one a symbolical mode of recording the traditions of the deluge, typifying the patriarchs and the ark by fish or creatures half fish; the other from the fecundity of fishes, which caused them to be taken as the emblems of abundance and increase.

Among the Hindoos, Vishnu is the fish pilot; and nations wide apart, as the Tartars and the ancient Britons, had their fish gods-the one the Nataghi, the other the Brithyll of the Kelts and Belgae. In Egypt many species of fishes were objects of veneration, as we are told by Herodotus. Cuvier has noticed no less than ten distinct species depicted on the walls of the sepulchral caves of Thebes, and the mummies of several kinds are found in great numbers stored up in the temples of Egypt.

29. DAGON, THE FISH GOD.-But among the Philistines the fish god was the national deity. Dagon, i.e., the fish, had many temples, the most famous of which were those of Gaza and Ashdod. He was represented with the face and hands of a man and the body of a fish. Thus we read, that when the ark of the Lord had been brought as a trophy into the temple of Dagon at Ashdod, "in the morning the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the

stump (Heb. fishy part) of Dagon was left to him" (1 Sam. v. 4). We find from 1 Mac. x. 84, that the worship of Dagon remained in Philistia even down to the epoch of the Hasmoneans, who destroyed the temple of Ashdod. Another Dagon or fish god, considered by Rawlinson to be distinct, was worshipped under the same figure by the Babylonians, and many of its sculptured and engraved figures have been found at Nimroud and Babylon. Sidon was also the fish goddess of Phoenicia. This fish-worship was the only one of the prevailing idolatries of the neighbouring nations to which the chosen people seem to have shown no inclination; pre-eminently an agricultural and pastoral race, they were naturally averse to any intimate connection with the sea.

30. The fish has also become emblematic in the symbolism of the Christian Church, and is a familiar device on the sepulchral monuments, especially of the East. This has arisen from the circumstance that the letters forming 'Ixus (fish) are the initials, in the Greek language, of Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεὸν υἱος, σωτήρ (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). The letters are most commonly inscribed at the beginning of the epitaph, but very often the fish itself is sculptured instead. Both may frequently be seen in the catacombs of Rome.

CHAPTER XI.

INVERTEBRATE AND ARTICULATED ANIMALS.

ALL the countless species of invertebrate animals and insects are grouped together in the Hebrew, under the description of creeping things;' and though Solomon, among his multifarious acquirements, did not overlook them, but spoke of creeping things,' as well as of beasts, fowls, and fishes, yet the mention of them in Scripture is for the most part incidental, with the special exception of the Locust, the habits and transformations of which noxious insect appears to have been studied and known by those who so often suffered from its ravages.

For convenience of description, it will be better to take the various creeping things mentioned in the Bible in their natural order, rather than, by treating of them alphabetically, to separate the consideration of closelyallied species.

MOLLUSCS.

SNAIL. TWO Hebrew words are rendered 'Snail' in our version. The one, chomet, in Lev. xi. 30, must be assigned to a species of Lizard [see p. 268]. With the other (shablul) alone we have here to do. It occurs only in Ps. Ìviii. 8: "As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away." The word evidently points to a snail or slug, which leaves a slimy track as it passes along, and which was supposed gradually to waste away in so doing. Although this notion is zoologically incorrect, for the Snail does not waste away by emitting its slimy exudation, yet the metaphor is none the less expressive, as in accordance with the popular belief.

But there seems to be another interpretation, suggested to me by personal observation in the country, which is more forcible, more in harmony with the context, and which is physically correct. The Snails of all species in the Holy Land are in the habit, not of hybernating in winter, as they do in our colder climate, but of shutting