Abraham Sapien is very intelligent and can read three books at a time. He can tell whom someone is (their name, their past and perhaps even dark secrets. Because he is not all human, despite his ability to speak English, walk, and associate with others rather well, he must occasionally return to a tank that was built for his own use. He listens to orchestras and famous works like Mozart. His vocabularly is most pretigious. His favorite food is rotten eggs.Sapien began life as Langdon Everett Caul, a Victorian scientist and businessman who became involved with the Oannes Society, an occult organization who believed in life and all knowledge having come from the sea. After retrieving a strange jellyfish-like deity from an underwater ruin, Caul and the other members performed an arcane ritual that inadvertently ended with the creature's release and Caul being turned into an icthyo sapien. Believing him to be Oannes reborn, the society sealed the developing icthyo sapien's body in a tube of water in the hidden laboratory beneath a Washington, D.C. hospital until such time as he was fully formed. Forced to abandon the site by the outbreak of the Civil War, the Society never found occasion to return for Caul, and there he stayed until he was found by workmen in November 1978. With no memory of his life before, the icthyo sapien received a new name from a piece of paper attached to the tube, dated the day of Abraham Lincoln's assassination (April 14, 1865). Abe Sapien was taken to the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) for a gruelling round of research by curious BPRD scientists, and was saved from vivisection by an empathetic Hellboy. Thereafter Abe entered the ranks of the BPRD as a valued field agent, embarking on his first mission with Hellboy in 1981.