In the first instance, taking the language of the Exodus in the most literal sense, he tells us that the river was turned into blood, _because_ it was a punishment particularly well adapted to that blinded and infatuated people, as a warning to the Israelites of the insufficiency of the false gods that the Egyptians worshipped. They had rendered divine homage to the Nile; and Herodotus informs us that the Persians held their rivers in the highest veneration; while the same worship obtained among the Medes, the Parthians, and the Sarmatians. The Greeks adored the Spercheius, to whose god Peleus vowed the hair of his son; the laureated Peneus, the earth-born Achelous, and the loving Alpheus. For, although it may be said that these streams were merely venerated as the symbols of their respective gods, it is possible that the Greeks might have fallen into the same errors as the worshippers of saintly images in more modern and enlightened times. Therefore, says our learned author, there was a great propriety in the judgment brought upon this people by Moses. They must have felt the utmost astonishment and horror when they beheld the sacred stream changed and polluted, and the divinity which they worshipped so shamefully soiled and debased. Moreover, he tells us that the Egyptian priests were particularly nice and delicate in their outward habits, making constant ablutions; and abhorred blood, or any stain of gore. In this plague the fish that were in the river died, and the river stunk. Now the priests and holy men not only never tasted fish, but looked upon them as deities. A city was built in honour of the god-fish, Oxyrunchus; the Phagrus[12] was worshipped at Syene, the Maeotis at Elephantis, and Antiphanes tells us that the Egyptians equally reverenced the eel.