[Illustration: FIG. 8.--VENUS RISING FROM THE SEA, SUPPORTED BY TRITONS. _After Calmet._] Thus the worship of Noah, as the second father of mankind, the repopulator of the earth, passed through various phases and transformations till it merged in that of Venus, who rose from the sea, and was regarded as the representative of the reproductive power of Nature--the goddess whom Lucretius thus addressed: "Blest Venus! Thou the sea and fruitful earth Peoplest amain; to thee whatever lives Its being owes, and that it sees the sun:" and to whom refers the passage in the Orphic hymn: "From thee are all things--all things thou producest Which are in heaven, or in the fertile earth, Or in the sea, or in the great abyss." Under this latter phase--the impersonation of Venus--the fish portion of the body was discarded, and the cast-off form was allotted in popular credence to the Tritons--minor deities, who acknowledged the supremacy of the goddess, and were ready to render her homage and service by bearing her in their arms, drawing her chariot, etc., but who still possessed considerable power as sea-gods, and could calm the waves and rule the storm, at pleasure. [Illustration: FIG. 9. FIG. 10. VENUS DRAWN IN HER CHARIOT BY TRITONS. _From two Corinthian coins._] Figs. 9 and 10 are from two Corinthian medals, each shewing Venus in a car or chariot drawn by Tritons, one male, the other female. On the obverse of Fig. 9, is the head of Nero, and on that of Fig. 10, the head of his grandmother Agrippina.[41] [41] It is worthy of note that the fish was also adopted as an emblem by the early Christians, and was frequently sculptured on their tombs as a private mark or sign of the faith in which the person there interred had died. It alluded to the letters which composed the Greek word [Greek: Ichthys] ("a fish") forming an anagram, the initials of words which conveyed the following sentiment: [Greek: Iesous], Jesus; [Greek: Christos], Christ; [Greek: Theou], of God; [Greek: gios], Son; [Greek: Soter], Saviour. But it doubtless bore, also, the older meaning of "preservation" and "reproduction," of which the fish was the symbol, and betokened a belief in a future resurrection, as Noah was preserved to dwell in, and populate, a new world. In 'Sea Monsters Unmasked,' page 55, I gave a figure, copied by permission from the _Illustrated London News_, of a rough sculpture in the Roman catacombs, of Jonah being disgorged by a sea-monster. Near to it was found, on another Christian tomb, one of these designs of the "fish;" and it is not a little curious that, whereas the animal depicted as casting forth Jonah is not a whale, but a sea-serpent, or dragon, the _ichtheus_ in this instance is apparently not a fish, but a seal. [Illustration: FIG. 11.--CHRISTIAN SYMBOL. _From the Catacombs at Rome._]