As the drunkard and the fool now intensify their strength and now lose it, so they now double and now lose their intelligence. Hence, among mythical fishes we find very wise ones and very stupid ones. The story is very popular of the three fishes of different intelligence, of which the lazy and improvident one allows himself to be caught by the fishermen, whilst his two companions escape; it is found in the first book of the _Pańćatantram_. In the fifth book of the _Pańćatantram_, a variety occurs: we read of a fish which has the intelligence of a hundred (Çatabuddhis), of one which has the intelligence of a thousand (Sahasrabuddhis), and of the frog which has the intelligence of one (Ekabuddhis); but that of the two fishes is not intelligence, but presumption; the one intelligence of the frog is better than the hundred and the thousand of the fishes. The frog escapes, but the two fishes fall into the hands of the fishermen.
The little sea-urchin (and the dwarf Vishṇus and the dolphin are equivalent to it, the word _çiṅçumâras_ being equivocal in Sanskṛit) in the _Ṛigvedas_ draws the chariot of riches; in the _Eddas_, a dwarf in the form of a pike (in Greek _lükios_, in Latin _lucius_) watches over gold, and guards the ring; in Russian legends, the little jorsh (formidable, like the josz, by its sharp quills), united with the dolphins, draws out of the sea the casket containing the sultan's ring. The horn of the moon, which appears in the sea of night, belongs now to the bull which carries the fugitive hero, now to the fish çapharî, which, having become large, takes in tow the ship of Manus, and saves it from the waters, that it may not be wrecked. Now it is the solar hero or heroine that takes the form of a fish to save himself or herself; now the fish helps the solar hero or heroine in their escape; now the little golden or luminous fish plunges into the sea, or into the river, to seek the pearl or ring for the hero or heroine who had let it fall, the ring without which King Dushyantas cannot recognise his bride Çakuntalâ; now it vomits out from its mouth or its tail that which it has swallowed--the hero, the pearl, the ring (the solar disc).
In the sixth act of _Çakuntalâ_, the fisherman finds in the stomach of a fish (the _cyprinus dentatus_), the pearl enchased in the ring which King Dushyantas had given to Çakuntalâ, in order to be able to recognise her when they should come together again. The genera _cyprinus_ and _perca_, as the thorny or wounding ones in the order of fishes, have supplied the greatest number of heroes to mythology; the sea-urchin is identified to them on account of its darts; the names _hecht_, _brochet_, _pike_, given to the _lucius_ in Germany, France, and England, express its faculty of stinging, or cleaving with its flat and cutting mouth (the fish _lucioperca sandra_ is an intermediate form between the perch and the pike). The lunar horn, the thunderbolt, the sunbeam, have the same prerogative as these fishes; the dolphin, on account of the two scythe-shaped fins which it has on its anterior extremity, or of its fat and curved dorsal fin, as well as on account of its black and silvery colour, might well serve to represent the two lunar horns and the moon's phases. Thus the pike and the bream, dark or bluish on their backs, are white underneath. The dolphin also has a flat mouth and sharp teeth, like the pike.[503] The lunar horn announces rain; thus the scythe-shaped fin of the dolphin, appearing on the waves of the sea, announces a tempest to navigators, warns them, and saves them from shipwreck; hence, as a çiṅçumaras, it may, like the sea-urchin, have saved or drawn the chariot, that is, the vessel of the Açvinâu, laden with riches. The dolphin which watches over Amphitritê, by order of Poseidon, in the Hellenic myth, is the same as the dolphin, the spy of the sea, or the moon, the spy of the nocturnal and wintry sky. Inasmuch as the sky of night or winter was compared to the kingdom of the dead, both the dolphin and the moon, according to the Hellenic belief, carried the souls of the dead.