of a high order to have been the first to
eat them. We do not know what Mr. Darwin
supposes they develope into. Is it possible that
a turtle ever becomes an alderman, or that
cold-blooded friend of ours, the oyster, a Poor-
law guardian? In a gazelle, a horse, a dog,
there are lines of exquisite grace and symmetry;
but a turbot is a most unclassical wretch, and
a whale is swollen out of all drawing. There is no
beauty in a jelly-fish, no contour in a haddock.
The richest dyes and stains are lavished on
millions of fish that never see man and never
want to see him; but truly the beauty of form
is for the most part denied those creatures.
They seem like mere hints and sketches of future
animals. As there is something of the goose in
one of the antediluvian animals (near the Sydenham
railway station), and something of the
crocodile in the plesiosaurus, so there may be, in
fish, the primary ideas of animals perfected in
the sun or the moon, flourishing there even
now, for all we know; and who is there to
contradict us? It is probable enough that,
protected from man and safe out of his way,
primeval forms of life still exist among fish, while
among animals they have passed away. The
elk, the sabre-toothed tiger, the mammoth,
have passed away; but there is no record of any
fish ever mentioned in old times that is not still
existing, except the kraken and the sea serpent;
and we would not believe in them, even if we
saw them. They have been seen, it is true; but
only by captains of whalers after the fourth glass
of rum-and-water. We do not know what
Professor Owen will say to us, but we cannot help
here remarking that even the skeleton of a
fish seems rudimentary. Look at the turbot's
bones; they merely form a sort of rough ladder.
The gurnet is all head, the alligator all mouth,
the whale all fat. Fish do not obey our laws
of form; their beauty is a beauty allied to use,
and has no affinity with human beauty.

But enough of the æsthetics of fish and their
ignorance of the sublime and beautiful. The
Greeks and Romans—epicures if there ever were
epicures—held fish in great esteem; the worst of
it is, that their fishes' names are so hopelessly
untranslatable that the learning of those great
compilers, Pliny and Athenæus, is from this
cause all but useless to us. Out of some
hundred species mentioned by Athenæus (in the
reign of Diocletian, A.D. 288) our friend the
learned Dreikopf of Jena could identify only some
half dozen, and as for river and sea fish, they
are mixed together by these omnivorous writers
in the most hopeless way. The same confusion,
however, Steinkopf of Leyden informs us, has
befallen the Hebrew names of birds, beasts,
fish and plants mentioned in the Bible, very few
indeed of which are correctly rendered in the
English. Archestratus praises the dog-fish
boiled with cummin, and the same writer advises
us to roast the pike, "the wisest of fish" as
Aristophanes calls him, without scaling, but
softened with salt and served up with brine.
The great idea of putting a pudding in the river
wolf's stomach had not yet been matured. "Let
no Italians or Sicilians approach the pot," says
Archestratus, "for they spoil fish by seasoning
them with cheese too much vinegar and
odious asafœtida." "Many seasoned dishes,"
says the practical poet, "they dress well
enough, but they have no idea of cooking good
fish in a plain honest way." Menander (in a
passage quoted by Athenæus) talks of a tench
that sold for nearly four drachmas (about three
shillings of our money); now, the tench is a poor
flabby mud fish, beautiful to look at in his olive-
brown scales, but hardly worth the cooking.
It appears that the tail of the sword-fish was
good eating, and they ate also polypi, several sorts
of sharks, and the inky cuttle-fish, supposed to
be the chief ingredient in the black broth of
the Spartans. Is it possible that the Greeks,
the men who wrote the great plays and carved
the unapproachable statues, were coarse feeders
and ignorant of the laws of dining?

There are some good stories told of Greek
and Roman epicures, proving them to have
been true gourmets and epicures of fancy. Two
epicures, Cindon and Demylus (says Aristodemus,
a Greek ancestor of Joe Miller), were
one day seated at table when a fine grayling was
brought in and placed before them. Cindon,
overcome by greediness, snatched at the eye
of the fish; on seeing Cindon thus rudely stealing
a march upon him, Demylus seized Cindon
by the hair, and threatening fiercely to pluck out
his eye, shouted:

"Let go that fish's eye, and I'll let go
yours!"

And it is told of Zeno, the Stoic, that dining
one day with a glutton, he snatched a huge
fish off a dish as it entered the room, crying to
the man: "Now you shall feel what those suffer
daily who live with you."

It is not a bad thing (for a classic joke)
which is told of Antagoras, the poet, and which
bespeaks a fine instinct for cooking.
Antagoras, having a bird to cook, refused to go to
the bath, as usual, for fear, in his absence, the
slaves should come and sop up the gravy. "Let
your mother watch it," said his friend Philocydes,
very naturally. "What?" replied this
great creature—"what? Entrust the gravy of
game to one's mother! The gods forbid!"

There is a pleasant tale told of a voracious
Greek, who, seeing a fine fish set on table, tore
off the top half, from head to tail, and devoured
it before any one could be helped, exclaiming:

"This is the Helen of the feast, let me be
the Paris!"

But enough of the Greeks; let us turn
to the more expensive and equally vicious
Romans. There is a Billingsgate tradition that a
lobster was once sold for four guineas, and
divided between two competing gourmets from
the West-end; but Juvenal talks bitterly (in
the satire that sent him to Upper Egypt) of a
six-pound mullet fetching six thousand sesterces
(about fifty pounds). That was in the reign of
Domitian. And then comes the satirist's
memorable scene about Domitian calling together
the senate to discuss how an enormous turbot,
just arrived from Ancona, was to be boiled:
a story not dissimilar to one told of that