fied, and no more was said; but all the town now knew that the woman was a fish woman.
Nothing bad happened from this for some time, though the husband had broken his great oath never to mention that his wife and her family were fishes; but one day a second wife whom the man had taken quarreled with the first wife—as wives will quarrel—and she taunted the first wife with being a fish, and laughed at her. The first wife was so much hurt at this that she made up her mind to go back to her family in the sea and become a fish once more. She went to her husband and said: "Twice have you done wrong: first, in refusing to let me go alone to visit my family; and secondly, in breaking your great oath and revealing my secret, which you swore to keep. I can no longer live in a place where I and my children will be laughed at and put to shame. I will return to my home."
Her husband endeavored to pacify her, but in vain, for she would not be pacified. He said he would send away the second wife, but still she was not satisfied. He begged and entreated her to stop, but it was all of no use. Then he tried to hold her and keep her by force, but she broke away from him, and running down to the seashore, called to him a last good-by, and plunged into the sea with her youngest child in her arms. After that she was never seen again. Her two elder children remained with their father, and from them is descended the Sarfu-ni-nam[1] clan, none of whom may ever eat sarfu, for the fish woman was, when in the sea, a fish of that kind.
Far from finding fault with the mistakes in science which we observe in the works of the early Christian exegetists, the Rev. John A. Zahm, of the University of Notre Dame, maintains that "we should rather he surprised that the errors are so few. They were certainly not more numerous, nor more serious, than those found in the works of the ablest of the professional exponents of the profane science of the period. It were foolish to expect them to know more about geograpliy than Eratosthenes and Strabo and Pomponius Mela, who had made a life study of the subject; or to demand of them a more accurate knowledge of astronomy than was possessed by Hipparchus or Ptolemy; or to suppose that they should have a more precise and a more extended acquaintance with physics and natural history than had Aristotle or Pliny. Such an exaction would be the height of unreason. As well might we find fault with them for not being so well versed in physics as Ampère or Maxwell, or reproach them for knowing less of astronomy than Leverrier or Father Secchi, and less of geography than Humboldt, Malte-Brun, or Carl Ritter men whose science was based on the experiments and observations of thousands of investigators, and on the accumulated knowledge of well-nigh twenty centuries."
- ↑ Sarfu-ni-nam, "No sarfu flesh"; literally, "Not to have sarfu flesh." The mrfu is a kind of horse mackerel.
