Ever since 1918, when I ate my first bouillabaisse—an event that in my mind overshadowed the end of the First World War—I have been hearing from French waiters and cooks that it is impossible to produce the genuine article in this country, because the essential ingredient is missing. In memory, that initiatory bouillabaisse—at Mouquin’s, on Sixth Avenue—remains impossible to ameliorate, but Roberto, the Mouquin waiter with the grenadier mustache, informed me that the dish, although sufficiently successful, was but a succédané, or substitute. “It lacks la rascasse,” he said. “It is like a watch without a mainspring. The rascasse does not exist except in the Mediterranean.” He offered no details, and though I did not know whether the rascasse was a crustacean, a fish, or an aquatic mammal, I did not ask, for fear of revealing my ignorance. In the years since 1925, when Mouquin’s closed its doors, a victim of Prohibition, I learned that the rascasse was a fish, but nothing more, although when I came to eat bouillabaisse in Marseille—good, but not as memorable as Mouquin’s—I inferred that some of the fragments in the broth were it. A friend of mine—Dr. Samuel B. McDowell, a zoologist now teaching at Rutgers’ branch in Newark—could have identified the fragments for me immediately if he had been there, but he wasn’t. Dr. McDowell is a student of comparative anatomy, with stress on its ichthyomorphological aspects, and not long ago I made the mistake of mentioning rascasse to him while we were lunching at a seafood restaurant called the Lobster, on West Forty-fifth Street. It is a mistake to mention anything unclear to McDowell, because he will go to entirely extravagant lengths to clarify it. The Lobster is not French, but it is a fine place for broiled fish, lobster, and beer. It no longer attempts bouillabaisse—largely, the proprietors once told me, because when it was put on the menu, customers brought along travelled friends who said that it couldn’t possibly be the real thing.
When I passed this information on to McDowell, he asked me why the authenticity of the bouillabaisse should have been denied. I answered that the essential ingredient did not occur on this side of the Atlantic. I felt that my explanation was safe, because a note in the American edition of Larousse Gastronomique says, “Many of the fish used in the bouillabaisse, such as the traditional rascasse, are not found except in the Mediterranean; they are virtually unknown in England and America, and no English name for them exists.” As for the preëminence of rascasse in bouillabaisse, I was leaning heavily on a distinguished and sensible authority, Waverley Root, who, in “The Food of France,” has written, “The subject of bouillabaisse is a complicated one. . . . For the ingredients, only one fish is agreed upon by everyone—rascasse. No two lists are the same, and rascasse is the only name common to all.”
McDowell asked me the name of the fish in English, and I said I did not know, here again relying on Root, who wrote, “My French-English dictionary has no idea of what rascasse is.” If I had looked in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, the only French-English dictionary I own, I would have found, under “rascasse,” “[In Languedoc], the Sea Scorpion,” and, further on, under “scorpion de mer,” “The Sea Scorpion; a red, great-headed, and wide-mouthed fish, which hath but a few, and those verie small, teeth; but in lieu thereof he is armed with many prickles, both on his backe and about his head.” Had I been able to give McDowell the “scorpion” clue, it would have saved him a lot of time. But I had not thought to go beyond Waverley Root. “What is rascasse?” Root asks, and answers himself, “It is a coarse fish, armed with spines, which lives in holes in the rocks, and would be allowed to stay there if it were not for bouillabaisse. Alone, it is not particularly good eating, but it is the soul of bouillabaisse. Cooked with other fish, rascasse is one of those catalytic foods, like the truffle, whose own contribution to taste seems meagre but which has the gift of intensifying other flavors.” Root is more the cook than the taxonomist; his description is not as specific as Cotgrave’s, but Cotgrave says nothing at all of the rascasse’s higher function.
Prosper Montagné, the learned compiler of the original French Larousse Gastronomique (1938), and himself a toque blanche hors concours, quotes in support of the indispensable-rascasse doctrine Joseph Méry (man of letters, 1798-1865):
(The translation is a rough one. Massilia, the Greek predecessor of Marseille, was a colony of Phocis. The Phocians are said to have brought into pre-France the olive, without which bouillabaisse, even with rascasse, would be impossible, since there would be no olive oil.) M. Montagné (as does Root) recites the neo-Phocian legend that Venus invented bouillabaisse in order to fill her husband, Vulcan, with it and make him fall asleep while she turned a trick with her lover, Mars. Like Root, he pooh-poohs it. “In ancient times, it was held established that fish soup flavored with saffron was soporific, an opinion exploded today,” Montagné writes. Root says, “It is based on the superstition that fish chowder made with saffron is a soporific (it is not, but any food taken in on the gargantuan scale that bouillabaisse encourages is likely to make the eater sleepy).” I cite both Montagné and Root on this particular point because of the new light cast upon this old story by McDowell’s subsequent investigations, which indeed exonerate saffron but indicate that Venus may have known a thing or two about the rascasse.
M. Montagné, then reflecting upon the etymology of “bouillabaisse,” strikes out the superficially easy derivation—“slow boil”—as unlikely, since bouillabaisse, despite what its name says, is the product of a quick boil over a high flame, instead of a long boil over a low one. He equally decries the Marseillais tradition that it was the invention of an abbess—the bouilli à l’abbesse—to kill the monotony of the Friday diet. My own speculation—that it may have been named for the miraculous taste of a bouilli containing an abbesse—apparently did not occur to M. Montagné, himself more resourceful at plats than at derivations. How the abbesse got into the stew is a matter to be settled later—perhaps she was a victim of cannibals. Alternatively, admirers, anticipating her canonization, may have boiled her to separate flesh from bones for the preparation of relics, as was done with the body of Louis IX of France. A dish need not take its name literally, as witness the Scotch woodcock, which is not game but a form of rarebit, which, in its original form—“Welsh rabbit”— was an example of the same thing, since it is not a rabbit.
“Have you any notion of the Latin name of the fish?” McDowell asked, not very hopefully, after I had recited what I remembered of rascassiana. When I said I hadn’t, he fell briefly silent and then began to tell me of his fears that if we ever learned to desalinate the ocean, the fly-casting lunatics would try to stock it with rainbow trout, a species for which he has great contempt as a parvenu in the zoological scale, since, by fossil evidence, it appeared only in the Miocene epoch, twenty-five million years ago. (His favorite fish, the halosaurs, have been around three times as long as that.) “They’ll poison all the more interesting fish with rotenone, in order to make life easier for Sparse Gray Hackle’s little playmates,” he said. “They’ve done that in a lot of freshwater streams already. The game-protection organizations and the tackle-makers have an invincible lobby, and comparative anatomists are politically unorganized.” McDowell is a man of many interests, all associated with fish.
About a fortnight later, McDowell sent me the following letter, the gastronomic as well as ichthyological implications of which should be clear to all:
“I want to thank you for the delicious lunch of red snapper the other day, and to apologize for the peculiar way I squirmed in my chair and bulged my eyes whenever a busboy cleared a nearby table. Because of years of exposure to tobacco smoke and formaldehyde preservative, my taste buds are in no condition to make me a judge of the delicacies of fine cookery, but I am a connoisseur of fine fishbones. The sight of that menu, with its marvellous variety of fishes, immediately suggested to me what delights in fishbones there must be in the kitchen garbage can. I could visualize a huge can of codfish skulls, with striking enlarged intercalary bones; Spanish-mackerel vertebral columns, with articulating processes designed with a fine precision and economy; and the skull of my own red snapper, with a magnificent supraoccipital crest. Through the years, I have learned not to follow the busboy out into the kitchen and rummage through the garbage, but the desire still comes over me, and I am not quite myself when the seductive hints of a fishbone-connoisseur’s paradise pass before my eyes on an otherwise emptied platter.
“On the matter of our discussion, if French chefs say they cannot make proper bouillabaisse in America because they cannot get rascasse, they either are pulling your leg or haven’t been trying very hard. I found a perfectly good rascasse du nord by looking under the porgies in a Newark fish market. It seems to me that lifting up a few porgies is little enough to expect of a man who claims a devotion to excellence in cuisine. The rascasse du nord, despite its name, occurs in the Mediterranean and goes into the pot there with the other rascasses.
“The hardest part of my rascasse hunt was finding out what a rascasse is. A little book by Hans Hvass and Jean Guibe entitled ‘Les Poissons’ helped me immeasurably. Since I know Jean Guibe to be topnotch on African frogs and Madagascar snakes, I put my complete confidence in his judgment of fish. Not only does this handy little book, which just misses fitting in my pocket by an eighth of an inch, give an excellent colored picture (page 54) but it has a brief and pungent discussion, on page 100, of the ‘Sebaste dactyloptère, ou Rascasse du Nord.’ (‘Dactyloptère’ means ‘finger-finned.’) Here it is revealed that this fish is known to science as Helicolenus dactylopterus. If the chefs had just said that first, I could have helped them sooner. Heticolenus is one of the Scorpaenidae, or scorpion fishes [at this point, I reflected that Cotgrave was no mug]—a family of fishes made famous (as fish families go) by one of its members, Synanceja horrida. This is the notorious stonefish. According to the ‘Guide and Historical Souvenir of Stage One of the New York Aquarium’ (1957), it is considered the most venomous of all fishes. It has thirteen large spines on its back, each with a pair of venom sacs attached, and persons who have stepped on these spines say that the pain is almost unbearable. At first, I was skeptical of this report and thought it might be a cautionary parable, in the ‘Slovenly Peter’ vein, put out by the Aquarium to discourage children from wading in the fish tanks, but the report is, if anything, an understatement. A more serious understatement is on the next page of ‘GAHSOSO,’ where it is said of the closely related lionfish (Pterois volitans), ‘It was once believed to be venomous, but this seems not to be correct.’ The New York Aquarium learned the penalty for scoffing at old wives’ tales a few months later, when, at 9 A.M. on December 12, 1957, an Aquarium employee, Edward Dols, was stung on the right thumb by a lionfish. Mr. Dols found the pain almost unbearable, and it was probably only speedy medical attention that saved his life. Carleton Ray and Christopher Coates, both of the Aquarium, reported the incident in the journal Copeia (1958, page 235), and observed, ‘There has been a tendency to underestimate the seriousness of the poisonous nature of this fish. Some ichthyologists and dealers in marine tropical fishes report—irresponsibly, we believe—that the sting is not serious. . . . We believe that this fish is capable of causing death to humans, either directly or through shock.’
“None of the books available to me claims that the rascasse is venomous, but my rascasse du nord has a groove on the front face of each spine in the dorsal fin, and I refuse to step on it until someone else does. [The newest edition of the common, or Petit, Larousse says of rascasse: “Name given to several teleostean fishes of the Mediterranean, comestible but covered with venomous spines.”]
“If some of your lazy chefs who don’t look under the porgies try to wiggle out by claiming that Helicolenus dactylopterus is not the proper rascasse, and insist on having a Mediterranean Scorpaena—scrofa or porcus—don’t let them get away with it. We have several species of Scorpaena on the American coast, including Scorpaena agassizi, Scorpaena plumieri, Scorpaena grandicornis, and Scorpaena braziliensis. It is true that these are tropical fishes, but there should be no more difficulty in bringing them to the New York market than in importing from Florida the red snapper we enjoyed together. Helicolenus dactylopterus is probably the only instance of the same species of rascasse occurring off both Marseille and our Atlantic coast, but Scorpaena plumieri, S. grandicornis, and S. braziliensis are so similar to the Mediterranean S. scrofa and S. porcus that gourmets should find them interchangeable. Haggling over the number of scales along the lateral line is for rug traders, not for connoisseurs of fine food.
“We have another member of the Scorpaenidae in our waters that is available in almost any quantity from the market. This is Sebastes marinus, variously called ‘redfish,’ ‘rosefish,’ ‘hemdurgan,’ ‘Norway haddock,’ and (in one of the fish markets I frequent) ‘baby red snapper.’ This last identification is quite erroneous, as a glance at the third suborbital bone will show, since in scorpaenids this bone covers the cheek and in snappers it does not. Possibly this fish could be used in an emergency when rascasse is not available.
“But I doubt whether the emergency is real. I try to take a charitable view, but I am forced to think that some gourmets have been irresponsibly spreading the rumor of our lack of rascasse without consulting Goode and Bean’s ‘Oceanic Ichthyology,’ first published in 1896. According to Goode and Bean (page 250), Helicolenus dactylopterus ‘occurs in the western Atlantic in numerous localities, having been first discovered by the trawler Fish Hawk in 1880, off Narragansett Bay.’ Even better, another species, Helicolenus madurensis (or, as Goode and Bean spell it, ‘maderensis’), is known from many points in deep water along the Atlantic coast, and Goode and Bean list at least twenty-nine specimens in the United States National Museum. (Museum preservation makes a fish inedible, and in any case these specimens are the property of the federal government and beyond the call of bouillabaisse.)
“My own rascasse is also inedible, since I soaked it in formaldehyde for a day and then transferred it to isopropyl alcohol. It now bears my personal collection number F.1766100. My fish collection is not really that big, but it seemed to me that a fish that indirectly inspired Thackeray to an ode deserved a museum number bespeaking an ancient and respected institution. It is still a handsome fish, although the red color has largely faded in the alcohol. I can’t help thinking, though, as I ponder my rascasse in odd moments, that it is a rather ordinary-looking fish to make such a difference to gourmets. It looks a bit like a sea bass, except that it has spines on its head, like a sea robin, and notably large, inquisitive eyes, If someone told me that a sea horse or an electric eel or an angler fish changed the flavor of a stew, I would believe it without a moment’s hesitation, but the rascasse proves that there must be more to a fish than meets the eye.
“In many ways, the rascasse reminds me of a sculpin. I am not alone in this opinion, because the scorpaenid fishes and the cottoid fishes (sculpins) are regarded as closely related by all right-thinking ichthyologists. We have loads of sculpins around, notably the hacklehead (Myoxocephalus octodecimspinosus). As far as I know, fishermen never eat sculpins but use them instead for purposes of augury. The capture of a large and ugly sculpin is widely regarded as an omen, although there seems to be no general agreement as to what it presages. A number of years ago, when my wife and I were vacationing in Maine, a cry came up from the pier of ‘Sculpin! Sculpin!,’ and half a dozen small boys fanned out in all directions to spread the news. Those of us interested in an advance tip on the weather gathered at the small pier where the sculpin had been landed and was now holding a séance. It was a particularly large and ugly sculpin, nearly two feet long, mud-colored, and with an unpleasant pimply array of spines on its toadlike head. It sat there on the boards, making no motion to escape into the water, and looked at us all very solemnly. We looked back at it expectantly, and for a few moments there was a strange stillness as we stood humbly in the awesome presence. Then the sculpin puffed a ripple along its ample belly and said ‘Harrumph.’ It repeated this a minute later, and we were transfixed waiting for the announcement to follow the preliminary throat-clearing. After about twenty minutes of harrumphing it became apparent that the sculpin had nothing to say. The crowd of watchers thinned out, some predicting a storm and others a cold snap, and when the sculpin finally expired, I was the only one at its side. It made a fine skeleton.
With best wishes,
SAM McDOWELL
“P.S. If I get any more rascasses, I shall certainly send them to you. Please save the bones for me, and be particularly careful about the third suborbital. It is a very important bone.”
My first reaction to McDowell’s letter was one of stupefaction, as if I had stepped on a stonefish. This is a world of constantly diminishing certainties, and the disappearance of even a negative one is a heavy loss; never again would I be able to say with assurance that there was no rascasse in America. My second reaction was one of joy for the Frenchmen I knew who worked kitchens and would no longer have to deprive themselves of the pleasure of making an authentic bouillabaisse. Root, ever a pragmatist, had said in his book that, rascasse or no rascasse, the best bouillabaisse that he had ever eaten was at the Restaurant du Midi, a small place on Forty-eighth Street, west of Eighth Avenue, “before society discovered it.” Root may have eaten his bouillabaisse there long ago, under the regime of the ancienne patronne, a woman known only as Ida, but the du Midi still makes a pretty good specimen now and then. (I have seen nobody more social there in the last ten years than an old six-day bike rider named Maurice Letourneur, who now makes wire wheels for racing sulkies.) Jean Pujol, the boss, is from Toulouse, not Marseille, but that still makes him a meridional, so I thought he would be glad to hear of the discovery.
I found him behind his bar, a heavy but active man whose large, inquisitive eyes take pleasure in all that goes on in front of him, which is sometimes considerable.
“M. Pujol,” I said after the ritual handshake, too much agog even to ask after the health of his wife, who runs Les Pyrenees, over on the other side of Eighth Avenue, “M. Pujol, can you believe it? The rascasse exists in America!”
Monsieur thought an instant, and then said “Et alors?” in a tone that made it translatable as “So what?” It was most disappointing.
“The rascasse,” I said, to jog his memory. “You know, the fish they say is indispensable for bouillabaisse.”
“What they say is not true,” M. Pujol said, like a parent who finally admits to a small boy that there is no Santa Claus when he sees that the boy is on the point of finding it out for himself.
A few days later, I received a second letter from McDowell. It said:
“I regret I haven’t found any more rascasses for you. Lately, teaching duties have reduced my visits to the fish markets where I have browsing privileges, but I did step into a Newark market last week, and found a mossbunker, or menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus). This is a fish of some distinction as the World’s Least Valuable Food Fish. Its generic name suggests a now departed hotel once noted for its restaurant, but while the zoological affinities of the mossbunker with the shad, the herring, and the sardine are very close, the mossbunker is nearly inedible, and even cats prefer a mackerel smoked over hot road tar. I have saved my mossbunker in case you want it.
“But my news is not all discouraging. Two Mediterranean rascasses are living right here in New York, down at the Coney Island Aquarium. My family and I paid them a visit, and Mr. James Atz, the curator, gave us some special attention and put them through their tricks. The rascasse does not have many tricks, but it can do two things well: it can sit as still as a stone and look most inconspicuous among the rocks at the bottom of the tank, and it can flit about in a blur of speed when tempted with a bit of fish on the end of a wire coat hanger.
“It would be very unwise to attempt to spirit the rascasses out of their tank. The Aquarium has arranged their quarters as a synoptic exhibit of the Scorpaenidae, and the rascasses (either Scorpaena scrofa or Scorpaena porcus) share their home with a lionfish (Pterois volitans) and two stonefish (Synanceja horrida). Mr. Atz, who wrote the ‘Guide and Historical Souvenir’ containing the unfortunate underestimate of the lionfish, has done penance by collecting literature on the venom of scorpaenid fishes. He showed me his collection, and the more I read, the less I liked the genus Synanceja. The venom of the stonefish is potent and is kept in plentiful supply in glands attached to the spines of the dorsal fin. The toxic component is protein in nature, and when injected into a mammal causes the blood pressure to drop toward zero. (Zero blood pressure is a serious debility.) Natives of New Guinea fear the stonefish, and make very accurate models of it for instructing the young in its avoidance. This is noteworthy for two reasons: the New Guinea natives live among a large and lethal variety of snakes of the cobra family without paying much attention to them, and their art is normally of a highly stylized sort that does not stoop to mere photographic naturalism. Very likely, all members of the rascasse group are poisonous.
“As I wrote you before, besides Helicolenus dactylopterus we have several species of Scorpaena on our Atlantic coast. Jordan, Evermann, and Clark’s ‘Checklist of Fishes of North and Middle America’ names six species from our coast, not counting the Gulf coast and Puerto Rico. Scorpaena braziliensis regularly extends north to Charleston, and Scorpaena grandicornis and Scorpaena plumieri occasionally wander up to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Scorpaena plumieri is variously known as rescacio, poison grouper, and Plumier’s pigfoot. As you well know, commercial fishermen discard from their nets many fish believed to have poor market value. If the gourmets would just tell the fishermen they want poison grouper or Plumier’s pigfoot to make soup, I am sure the fishermen would save all they catch. I have found fishermen exceptionally willing to make allowances for exotic tastes and mental aberrations on the part of customers, and my requests for stargazers, toadfish, and lumpsuckers have always been honored without so much as a raised eyebrow. I have no idea how a fish got a name like Plumier’s pigfoot, but Jordan, Evermann, and Clark show some tendency to bowdlerize fishermen’s names for unrespected fish, and their transcription may not be accurate.
“The more I think about it, the less I can believe it a mere coincidence that the rascasse is venomous and also essential to bouillabaisse. Is it the venom—or some metabolic precursor of the venom—that makes the rascasse essential ?
Yours concernedly,
SAM
“P.S. If it is the venom, and there aren’t enough Scorpaenidae available to meet the demand for fresh rascasse—I imagine that no hostess would now venture to serve bouillabaisse without the essential ingredient—perhaps the venom can be extracted and sold in small bottles, like Worcestershire sauce, while the irrelevant parts of Helicolenus and his kin can be ground into cat food. Or perhaps tarantulas can be substituted for rascasse in the traditional recipe. Maybe we can make money exporting them to Marseille.”
The note on the effect of stonefish venom on the blood pressure led me to reconsider the legend of the invention of bouillabaisse by Venus to serve to her husband as a soporific. It may be true that saffron is no sleeping potion, but an unduly large proportion of rascasse in the quick stew might have the same effect as a weak dose of the related stonefish poison. It could well have put even Vulcan to sleep, let alone an ordinary Provençal husband, and it may have served as a catalyst, or latchkey, in many a meridional love affair. A phenomenon generally reported is not to be brushed aside because of a wrong popular ascription of its cause. Proving saffron blameless does not exculpate bouillabaisse as a form of conjugal knockout drops, if rascasse is present. (It would be, incidentally, the kindest form of sedative yet invented, and a tribute to the savoir-faire of Venus, who understood how to keep husband and lover concurrently happy.) However, if I were a Marseillais husband with a pretty wife, I would always be careful to ask her how much rascasse there was in the bouillabaisse.
A third letter from McDowell followed shortly, and this one began:
“Since I know that for many years you have admired France and the French, it is difficult for me to tell you of the shocking discovery I have made. First, I thought it best to forget the matter and pretend that nothing had happened, but as a scientist I am committed to truth, and truth must speak out. It is my very painful duty to report that the French have known all the time that we have rascasse in America. Cuvier and Valenciennes, in the fourth volume of their monumental ‘Histoire Naturelle des Poissons’ (published in Paris in 1829), say this in their account of ‘la petite scorpène brune, plus spécialement appelée Rascasse (Scorpaena porcus, Linn. )’: ‘M. Milbert sent us a specimen from New York.’ I think it improbable that Milbert’s specimen was actually the Mediterranean species Scorpaena porcus—more likely it was a Plumier’s pigfoot on its way north—but any fish enough like Scorpaena porcus to fool Cuvier and Valenciennes should do perfectly well in a bouillabaisse. In a previous letter, I promised you my next rascasse. I hope you will understand that it is only patriotic duty that forces me to break that promise. I intend to send my next rascasse to Andre Malaux, together with an anonymous note saying, ‘Your secret is known.’
“I confirmed that America’s lack of rascasse is a baseless canard through a telephone call to Dr. Giles Mead. Dr. Mead used to work for the government’s Fish and Wildlife service, in Washington, but not long ago became curator of fishes at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (a bit of swimming against the current that makes him the equal of the Chinook salmon). Dr. Mead told me that Heliolenus dactylopterus is not uncommon off our coast but that fishermen throw them overboard. News of this high potential of a native rascasse fishery came at a fortunate time, for I was overhasty at suggesting the tarantula as a substitute. Our supply of tarantulas is severely limited now, and my suggestion was impractical. Once, you could pick up all the tarantulas you wanted down at the docks where the banana boats unload, but today the holds of the banana boats are fumigated, severely restricting our imports of tarantulas, baby boa constrictors, cat-eyed snakes, and Schlegel’s palm vipers. We have some native tarantulas, particularly in the Southwest, but they are smaller than the banana-boat kind, and when a man wants a tarantula at all he generally wants the biggest he can get. French tarantulas are even smaller than our tarantulas and, as far as I know, are never used in bouillabaisse. It is probably just as well not to flout tradition, particularly when it would be expensive. Biological supply houses charge a dollar seventy-five apiece for the relatively small American tarantulas. This is a dollar and a half more than I paid for my rascasse.
Your obedient servant,
SAM
“P.S. Going back to Goode and Bean’s ‘Oceanic Ichthyology,’ I find that the two species of Helicolenus they mention—H. dactylopterus and H. madurensis—are so similar that only an expert can tell them apart. There are grounds for suspicion that this expertise is not possessed by the fish themselves, and that the two species recognized by Goode and Bean are probably only one, Helicolenus dactylopterus.
“P.P.S. The above letter, along with my previous letters, summarizes all that I know about the rascasse. This is probably as much as anyone should know, for all reputable philosophers are agreed that the world’s unhappiness results from the rapid expansion of scientific knowledge, which has outstripped our learning in the social spheres. The world is unhappy enough already without my finding out more about the rascasse than our social and religious institutions can cope with.” ♦