'When in the Zodiac the fish wheel round, They loose the floods and irrigate the ground.' "In his directions to the husbandman for the month of February, old Tusser says: 'To the coast, man, ride, Lent stuff provide;' with another couplet in encouragement of the fisherman, 'The land doth will, the sea doth wish, Spare sometimes flesh, and feed off fish.' "The Zodiacal signs also appear as an ornament on antique vases, coins, pavements, &c., and are painted in bright colours on the inside of several mummy cases now in the British Museum. A manuscript in the Cottonian Library shows the sign Pisces having a connecting line from the tail of each fish."[1] On many churches and other buildings both in England and on the continent the same device is found. The porch of the Virgin at Notre Dame at Paris has a number of compartments representing the zodiacal signs and the labours of the different months. The doorway of the church of St. Margaret, York, is similarly adorned, as is one of the porches of Merton College, Oxford. The western doorway of Iffley Church, said to be one of the most beautiful specimens of Anglo-Norman architecture in England, bears the sign of the fishes. In Canterbury Cathedral also is a pavement of large stones, somewhat rudely inlaid, bearing figures of the zodiacal signs in circular compartments. The fishes are attached by a line passing from mouth to mouth. In the Roman Catacombs the fish is frequently found amongst the countless inscriptions with which the walls are crowded. Maitland describes it as there found as a symbol expressive of the name of Christ, and remarkable as affording a combination of everything desirable in a tessera, or mystic sign. The Greek for fish, ιχθυς, contains the initials of Ιησους, Χριστος Θεος Υιος Σωτηρ: Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour; a sentence which had been adopted from the sibylline verses. Moreover the phonetic sign of this word, the actual fish, was an emblem whose meaning was entirely concealed from the uninitiated: an important point with those who were surrounded by foes ready to ridicule and blaspheme whatever of Christianity they could detect. Nor did the appropriateness of the symbol stop here. "The fish," observed Tertullian, "seems a fit emblem of Him whose spiritual children are, like the offspring of fishes, born in the water of baptism."[2]