monuments, is essentially the ichthyomorphic god, and his image almost invariably combines the forms of fish and man. In astronomical tables frequent mention is made of the catasterism of the "fish of Êa," which is indubitably our sign Pisces, since it presides over the month Adar. It is to a connection of ideas based on the diluvian record, that we must attribute the placing of Pisces--primarily of the "fish of Êa"--next to Aquarius, whose relation to the history of the Deluge we have already pointed out. Here we have an evident allusion to the part of Saviour attributed by the people who invented the Zodiac, to the god Êa in the flood, and to the idea of an ichthyomorphic nature especially belonging to this aspect of his personality. Êa is, moreover, the Oannès, lawgiver of the fragments of Berosus, half-man, half-fish, whose form, answering to the description given by the Chaldean history, has been discovered in the sculptures of Assyrian palaces and on cylinders, the Euahanès of Hygin, and the Oès of Helladios.[46] Whenever we find among two different peoples one same legend, with as _special_ a circumstance which does not spring _naturally_ and _necessarily_ from the fundamental facts of the narrative, and when, moreover, this circumstance is closely connected with the whole religious conceptions of one of these peoples, and remains isolated and alien from the customary symbolism of the other, criticism lays it down as an absolute rule that we must conclude the legend to have been transmitted from the one to the other in an already fixed form, to be a foreign importation, superimposed, not fused with the national, and as it were genial, traditions of the people, who have received, without having created it.