The worship of fish or of a fish-god is one of the outcomes of the old Nature-worship--the cult of Cybele and Rhea, who in the Greek Islands became the great mother Aphrodite born of the sea, and in Syria Ashtaroth (Astarte). She appears also as Atargatis, the Syrian fish-goddess born from a fish's egg, and worshipped at Hierapolis; her worshippers must not eat fish. Dagon, the fish-god of the Philistines, belongs to the same group of mythologic inventions. He was half-fish and half-human, like a merman, and is, in spite of this strange personality identified with the Greek Adonis! The cult of the fish-god was widely spread in ancient Greece, even in Byzantine times, and many Christian converts were devotees of the fish worship. I have on my table a photograph of a life-sized fish modelled in gold which was dug up in 1883 from the shores of a lake near the coasts of the Black Sea. It was at one time supposed to be of mediaeval workmanship, but is now shown to be of ancient Greek workmanship (450 B.C.), and was probably a votive offering connected with the worship of the fish-god. Then, again, in the ancient Indian story of the Deluge we read of Manu (who is the Noah of that variety of the ancient legend) finding a remarkable young fish in a stream where he is bathing. The young fish (which is really the god Vishnu in disguise) can talk, and requests Manu to take care of it, and promises him if he does so to reveal to him when the deluge is coming on. Manu takes the fish home and rears it. He then is told by the fish to prepare an ark, and place on board useful animals and seeds and then to embark on it with his family. The ark floats away in the flood, guided by the sagacious fish, which seizes a rope and, swimming in front of the ark, tows it to a mountain in Armenia (Ararat!), where the vessel rests whilst the flood goes down. There was evidently a special cult of the fish in Syria and the East, which spread to Greece and Rome in very early pre-Christian times, and survives in some of the stories in the "Arabian Nights" about human beings being turned into fish. It is not surprising that this cult should have lodged itself by obscure means in the practices of the early Church.