“And first for the Antiquity of Angling, I shall not say much; but onely this: Some say, it is as ancient as Deucalion’s Floud: and others (which I like better) say that Belus (who was the inventer of godly and vertuous Recreations) was the Inventer of it: and some others say (for former times have had their Disquisitions about it) that Seth, one of the sons of Adam, taught it to his sons, and that by them it was derived to Posterity. Others say, that he left it engraven on those Pillars, which hee erected to preserve the knowledge of Mathematicks, Musick, and the rest of those precious Arts, which by God’s appointment or allowance, and his noble industry were thereby preserved from perishing in Noah’s Floud.”—Isaak Walton, The Compleat Angler.

“Elle extend ses filets, elle invente de nouveaux moyens de succÈs, elle s’attache un plus grand nombre d’hommes. Elle pÉnÈtre dans les profondeurs des abÎmes, elle arrache aux angles les plus secrets, elle poursuit jusqu’aux extrÉmitÉs du globe les objets de sa constante recherche.”—G. E. LacÈpÉde, Hist. Nat. des poissons.

“What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed, when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all Conjecture.”—Sir Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall.

The craft of Fishing possesses an ancestry so ancient, or according to a Polynesian legend so literally abysmal, that for those who have their business on the waters, deep or shallow, it is but seemly, it is certainly of interest, to essay the tracing of its pedigree, and the linking of the generations of its far-flung lineage.

What were, and whence came its first forbears, and of what manner and of what matter were the original parents of its devices are questions which should appeal to the large majority of its followers. The sansculottes, however stalwart, who does not in his heart of hearts rejoice in owning, or claiming, some genealogical garments, wherein to hide his nakedness, is rare and abnormal.

The pedigree is like and unlike its celebrated Urquhart brother. Like in the gaps in generations, which in his endeavour directly to deduce his family from Adam even Sir Thomas’s ingenuity failed to bridge, despite the prolongation when necessary of the lives of his ancestors to ten times the allotted span. Unlike in antiquity, since it stretches far, very far beyond “Deucalion’s Floud” and Adam’s Paradise.

Angling, despite wide ramifications, has perhaps stamped its stock more vividly and has bred truer to original type than its elder brother Hunting. The variance of a repeating rifle from what some hold to be their common first sire, a sharpened pole, is larger and more marked than that of our most up-to-date Rod.

The riddle, as in other cases of disputed succession, of identifying the first real head of the family or the earliest begetter of the race is rendered more complex by wide geographical dispersion. It is possibly insoluble.

Nevertheless to this labour of love I now address myself.

The question of priority of the implement used for catching fish has been often moot, sometimes acute, for, in Walton’s words, “former times have had their Disquisitions about it.”

How did the earliest fisherman secure his prey? Was it by means of the Spear, under which term I include harpoons and barbed fishing spears of any kind, the Net, or the Line? None of these has lacked its champions, of whom the Line has attracted the fewest, the Spear the most.

Uncertainty as to the order of precedence was not really remarkable. We lacked even as late as the beginning of the last century both the data as to Egyptian and Assyrian fishing, which the discovery of the key to the hieroglyphs by Champollion and to the cuneiform by Rawlinson has laid bare, and the data as to the fishing of the Troglodytes which scientific examination of the caves of France and Spain has revealed.

The outlook of our forefathers was necessarily limited, indeed monotopical. No big maps of the archÆological world widened their vision. Some sectional sketches, and these badly charted, obscured their perspective.

The priority of the Net at one time probably enrolled the majority of adherents. Nor can we wonder, when we realise that in the case of a country so ancient as India we light on no method of fishing other than Netting—and even that till the post-Vedic literature after 200 b.c. most rarely—in Sanskrit or Pali literature before 400 a.d.[1] Hence came the deduction, not unnatural but illogical, since it stresses too strongly the argument of silence or omission—i.e. because no specimen or representation of a thing exists the thing itself never existed—that the Net must have been the first implement.

And even now after many years of exploration in Mesopotamia a champion of the Net or of the Line, if he similarly disregarded logic and all save Assyrian remains, might not unreasonably proclaim their antecedence to the Spear, of which no mention or representation as a method of fishing has yet been unearthed.

In the case of Egypt the advocate either of the Spear or Net has not as strong, certainly not so clear, a case. Although examples of the first have been discovered in prehistoric graves, the Net finds representation earlier than the Spear. Be this how it may, the Spear, Net, Line, Rod flourish synchronously in the XIIth Dynasty c. 2000, or according to Petrie’s chronology about 3500 b.c.

In China, unless the sentence of the quite modern I shih chi shih, that in the reign of the legendary Emperor who first taught the use of fire, “fishermen used the silk of the cocoons for their lines, a piece of sharpened iron for their hooks, thorn-sticks for their rods, and split grain for their bait,” be potent enough to produce a protagonist for the priority of the Rod, the boldest advocate would shrink from championing either the Spear or Net. The first mention c. 900 b.c. (I know of none actually written before this date[2]), shows them, and the Rod, in general and simultaneous operation.

From Crete shines out no guiding light. The dÉbris recovered from centres of the ‘Minoan’ civilisation yields frequent and in the main vivid pictures of fish, e.g. those on the Phaistos Disc (which is considered the earliest instance of printing in Europe at any rate) and the flying fish on glazed pottery from Knossos. But unfortunately neither in the Annual Reports of Sir Arthur Evans to the British School at Athens nor (he tells me) in his forthcoming book do modi piscandi obtain notice.

In Greece, a champion of any single method would be sadly to seek. The Spear, the Net, the Line, and the Rod all occur in our earliest authority, Homer, and, curious to note, as a rule in similes. From the fact that the Spear finds mention but once, the Net twice, and the Line (with or without the Rod) thrice, a real enthusiast has deduced an argument for the priority of the last two over the Spear!

This short survey forces the conclusion that we cannot fix definitely which was the method adopted by the earliest historical fishermen.

Before proceeding on our search for further data two points should be emphasised. First, the period covered even by the longest historical or semi-historical record counts but as a fraction of the time since geology and archÆology prove Man to have existed on earth.

Grant, if you will, the demand of the most exacting Egyptologists or Sumerologists, to whom a thousand years are as nothing; concede their postulated five or six thousand years; of what account is one lustrum of millenniums when compared with the years—not less than two million according to some geologists[3] —which have elapsed since Man first came on the scene?

Second, all the above nations possessed an advanced civilisation. Neither civilisation nor fishing is a Jovelike creation, springing into existence armed cap-À-pie. Both, like our friend Topsy, “growed,” and both demanded long periods for growth and development from their primitive origin.

In fishing these were retarded by the innate conservatism of the followers of the cult. The psychology of the faithful is an odd blend of dogged, perhaps unconscious, adherence to the olden ways and of an almost Athenian curiosity about “any new thing,” which as often as not sees itself discarded in favour of the ancient devices.

Even in this year of our Lord a cousin of mine, who Ulysses-like many rivers has known, much tackle tested, habitually (influenced no doubt by the recipe for the line given by Plutarch and passed on by Dame Juliana Berners) inserts between his line and his gut some eighteen inches of horse hair! But even in him the law of development works, for he does not Pharisaically adhere to the strict letter of the text, and insist that the hair comes only from the tail of a stallion or gelding![4]

Then, again, not less than two thousand odd years were needed for the Rod and the Line of Ælian’s Macedonian angler to take unto themselves a cubit or so more of length than their Egyptian predecessors.[5] The latter may, however, have been rendered shorter than actually used from the regard paid to artistic convention by the craftsman of Beni-Hasan.

But the connection of the line to the rod furnishes the most arresting instance of conservatism or slow development. Progress from the Egyptian method, which made fast the line to the top of the rod,[6] to a “running line” took, so far as discoverable records show, no less a period than that between c. 2000 b.c. and our sixteenth or seventeenth century, i.e. some 3600, or (according to Petrie) over 5000, years!

The Reel, which, however rude, would appear a much more complicated device than other conceivable methods of a running line, seems yet to be mentioned first. The earliest description occurs in The Art of Angling, by T. Barker, 1651, the first propagator of the heresy of the salmon roe, and according to Dr. Turrell “the father of poachers.” The earliest picture figures in his enlarged edition of 1657. The Reel affords another instance of slow growth. Its employment except with salmon or big pike only coincides with the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The development to the more subtle method of play by means of spare line can only be conjectured.

It was obviously invented somewhere between 1496 (The Boke of St. Albans, where we are expressly told to “dubbe the lyne and frette it fast in ? toppe with a bowe to fasten on your lyne”) and 1651, when Barker mentions the “wind” (which was set in a hole two feet or so from the bottom of the rod) as a device employed by a namesake of his own, and presumably by few beside at that time.

Walton four years later, but anticipating Barker by two as to its employment in salmon fishing, writes of the “wheele” about the middle of the rod or nearer the hand as evidently an uncommon device, “which is to be observed better by seeing one of them than by a large demonstration of words.”

Focussing a perplexed eye on the picture vouchsafed by Barker in his enlarged edition of 1657, we are impressed by the wisdom of Father Izaak. Frankly it is not easy to discern from it what Barker’s “wind” was intended to be or what the method of working. Apparently he had in mind two distinct implements, a “wheele” similar to Walton’s (such perhaps as is figured in the title page of The Experienced Angler by their contemporary Venables) and a crude winder, such as survives to-day in our sea-fishing, but intended as an attachment to a Rod.[7]

This marks a logical and likely step in evolution. It is inconceivable that invention should have soared to a Reel without there having been some intermediate stage between it and the “tight” line. The advantage of extra line for emergencies must have been recognised pretty early, and a wire ring at the top of the Rod, through which the line could run, naturally resulted from such recognition.

The method of disposing of the “spare” line may be presumed from survival of primitive practice. Not many years ago pike fishers in rustic parts of England often dispensed with a reel. They either let their spare with a cork at its end trail behind on the ground, or wound it on a bobbin or a piece of wood, stowed away in a pocket. Nicholas explains Walton’s (chap. v.) “running line, that is to say, when you fish for a trout by hand at the ground” as “a line, so called, because it runs along the ground.”

It seems impossible to fix with certainty the period at which fishing with a running line made its first appearance. No early data exist, nor do the few early pictures of mediÆval rods indicate the presence of a wire top ring. I had a lively hope, when I recalled its many plates and figures, of extracting some guidance from the most important French work of early date (1660) dealing with fishing, Les Ruses Innocentes, which may be described (mutatis mutandis) as the counterpart of The Boke of St. Albans.

The first four books are concerned with “divers methods” (of most of which the author, À la Barker, claims the invention) for the making and the using of all kinds of nets for the capture of birds, both of passage and indigenous, and of many kinds of animals.

The fifth confides to us “les plus beaux secrets de la pÊche dans les RiviÈres ou dans les Etangs.” As the secrets are concerned almost entirely with Net fishing, little light reaches us. Both the instructions and illustrations in chap. xxvi., Invention pour prendre les Brochets À la ligne volante, show that the line after being attached about the middle of the pole was twisted round and round till made fast at the end of the pole, from which depended some eighteen feet of line.[8]

Setting conjecture aside and faced by the fact that the Egyptian line was certainly made fast at the top and that neither illustrations nor writings (so far as I have been able to discover) indicate any other condition, we are driven by a mass of evidence, negative though it be, to the conclusion that the ancients[9] and the moderns down to some date between 1496 and 1651 fished with “tight” lines.

These were either fastened to the Rod whip-fashion, or possibly looped to it. The distinction is only important in so far as a horse-hair loop at the end of the Rod may have developed into a top ring of wire, which must not be confused with rings fixed along the Rod, which R. Howlett, in The Angler’s Sure Guide, 1706, seems the first to note.

Why the Greeks or Romans should not have emancipated themselves from the tight line of Egypt and evolved the running line by the mere force of their inventive genius causes much astonishment. This grows acute when we remember that they knew a fish whose properties and predatory endowments furnished an ideal example of the advantages of the running line.

Of the angler fish and its methods of securing food Aristotle, Plutarch, and Ælian are eloquent.[10] From Plutarch we learn that “the cuttle fish useth likewise the same craft as the fishing-frog doth. His manner is to hang down, as if it were an angle line, a certain small string or gut from about his neck, which is of that nature that he can let out in length a great way, when it is loose, and draw it in close together very quickly when he listeth. Now when he perceiveth some small fish near unto him,” he forthwith plies his nature-given tackle.

With the tight line play can only be given to a fish by craft of hand and rod. Anglers know to their sorrow that although much may be thus accomplished, occasions too frequently arise when the most expert handling can avail naught.

In Walton’s time the custom, as indeed it was the only present help, in the event of a big fish being hooked was to throw the Rod into the water and await its retrieval, if the deities of fishing so willed, till such time as the fish by pulling it all over the water had played himself out. But the existence of some method of releasing line rather earlier than Barker and Walton may perhaps be inferred from the following passage in William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (Fifth Song), published 1613-16:—

A few years suffice to span the interval between William Browne and Barker, whereas between Theocritus and Barker a great gulf of time yawns unbridged. Thus we have renderings of the former (Idyll XXI.) and of other classical authors by translators (more especially when they happen to be also anglers!) which demonstrate ignorance or ignoring of the fixity of line and the absence of reel.

These, if not palpably anachronous, afford at any rate evidence of incuriosity concerning facts. Their “then I gave him slack” and other similar expressions, true enough of our present line, can be no way applicable to the conditions of ancient Angling, unless the words mean—and then only by strained construing—that their “slack” was given by depression of Rod rather than by lengthening of line.

With the hook also we are confronted with a similar slowness of development. This is so well attested that we need more than even the authority of Butcher and Lang to establish what their slip in translating ??apt? ????st?a as bent hooks in Odyssey IV., 369, and as barbed hooks in Odyssey XII., 332, would suggest, viz. a synonymous form of a synchronous invention.

Since it is impossible to fix the length of time, if any, which separates the New Stone from the Copper Age, we can make no adequate guess as to how many generations of men and how many centuries of time were needed to transform the bent into the barbed hook. Perhaps Æneolithic experts can.

Extant examples from Egypt of both furnish, however, some chronological data. If the argument from silence, or rather from non-survival in one particular country, be not pressed unduly, these tend to prove that so far from their being twin brethren, the birth of the bent anteceded that of the barbed hook by at any rate the number of years which separated the Ist from the XVIIIth Dynasty, before which the occurrence of a barbed hook is rare.

The first implement of fishing, be it what you please, was no split-cane Rod, nor the “town-like Net” of Oppian, but some simple device created by the insistent necessity of procuring food. With our primitive ancestors, as with the companions of Menelaus, often “was hunger gnawing at their bellies,” a hunger accentuated at one period by the retreat further into the primeval forests or at another by the actual decrease of the animals, which had hitherto furnished the staple of Man’s sustenance.

Fortunately other data more ancient and more authoritative than the Egyptian or Sumerian as to priority of implement help the quest of ArchÆologists.

Blazing their trail backwards in the half-light of non-historical forests, they hap on many a cache of ancient devices in the settlements of the New Stone Man. Pausing merely to examine these, they cut their way through yet denser and darker timber, until eventually they emerge at an opening wherein once stood the ultimate if scarcely the original storehouse, whence Neolithic Man drew and in the course of long travel bettered his materials—the dwelling place of the Old Stone Man.

To this storehouse we too must press, tarrying only at the caches to note cursorily Neolithic betterment or invention. The dwelling place is one of many mansions, or rather of many rude caverns dotted over Europe.

Of such are Kent’s Cave near Torquay (which from its remains of animals may have been a mansion, or technically a “station,” as early as any), the Kesserloch in Switzerland, the shelters, or cavernes, in Southern France, of which La Madelaine in Dordogne, earliest to be discovered, ranks still the most famous, and a score or so of stations in Spain—not limited we now realise to its north-west corner—of which Altamira, not far from Santander, stands out pre-eminent.

With their exploration a remoter vista has opened out in recent years; a wholly new standpoint has been gained from which to review the early history of the human race. A brilliant band of prehistoric archÆologists has brought together such a mass of striking materials as to place the evolution of human art and appliances in the Quaternary Period on a level far higher than had been previously ever suspected. The investigations of Lartet, Cartailhac, Piette, Breuil, Obermaier, etc., have revolutionised our knowledge of a phase of human culture which goes so far back beyond the limits of any continuous story that it may well be said to belong to an older world.

These sentences of Sir Arthur Evans[11] gain further emphasis from Professor Boyd-Dawkins: “It is not too much to state that the frescoed caves in Southern France and Northern Spain throw as much light on the life of those times as the Egyptian tombs do on the daily life of Egypt, or the walls of the Minoan palace on the luxury of Crete, before the AchÆan conquest.”

The picture of PalÆolithic life revealed by these dwelling places attracts from every point of view. But as our last is fish and fishing, to fish and fishing we must stick. I shall therefore limit myself to the caves which furnish specimens or representations of ichthyic interest, with the one exception of “marvellous Altamira,” which, though it unfortunately yields us no portrayals of fishing, from every other aspect compels mention.

So astonishing was the discovery of this cave with its whole galleries of painted designs on the walls and ceilings that it required a quarter of a century and the corroboration of repeated finds on the French side of the Pyrenees for general recognition that these rock paintings were of the PalÆolithic age, and that features, which had been hitherto reckoned as exclusively belonging to the New Stone Man, can now be classed as the original property of the Man of the Old Stone Age in the final production of his evolution.

These primeval frescoes in their most developed state (Evans, ibid., tells us) show not only a consummate mastery of natural design, but also an extraordinary technical resource. Apart from the charcoal used in certain outlines, the chief colouring matter was red and yellow ochre, mortars and palettes for the preparation of which have come to light. In single animals the tints are varied from black to dark and ruddy brown or brilliant orange, and so by fine gradations to paler nuances, obtained by scraping and washing.

The greatest marvel is that such polychrome masterpieces as the bisons standing and couchant or with limbs huddled together were executed on the ceilings of inner vaults and galleries, where the light of day never penetrated. Nowhere does smoke blur their outlines, probably (as Parkyn[12] suggests) because of long oxidisation. The art of artificial illumination had evidently progressed far. We now, indeed, know that stone lamps, decorated in one case with the head of an ibex, already existed.

“Les extremes se touchent” was here aptly exemplified, for to a very young child was it reserved to discover the very oldest art gallery in the world. In 1879 SeÑor de Santuola chanced to be digging in a cave on his property, when he heard his little daughter cry, “Toros, toros!” Realising quickly that this was no warning of an impending charge by bulls, he followed her gaze to the vaulted ceiling, where his eyes there espied “the finest expression of PalÆolithic art extant.”

This little Spanish girl was the first for many, many thousands of years to behold a collection of pictures, which demonstrate not only the high point of excellence to which the art of the Troglodytes had attained, but also, from the absence of perspective and of decorative as compared with pictorial composition, indicate how long is probably the interval and how far is the separation between them and the Men of the Neolithic Age.

Not only in the character of their Art, which if more specialised in subjects was superior in representative quality, but also in the substance and in the method of fashioning their fishing and hunting implements, the separation between the Old Stone and the New Stone Man is very marked.

The former for their stone implements almost always used flint. They worked it to shape merely by flaking or chipping. The latter employed also diorite, quartzite, etc., and in addition to flaking fashioned them by grinding and polishing.[13]

It must, I fear, be acknowledged that the caches of the New Stone Age fail to give us the help expected towards settling what was the first implement employed. It is true that they yield hooks, nets, net-sinkers, which may have been merely developments of Troglodyte tackle, but, judging from the absence of any surviving PalÆolithic example, were more probably new inventions.

But neither these nor the implements of succeeding Ages furnish us with evidence sufficient to decide the tackle first employed by the earliest fisherman, or even by the Old Stone Man, for, as Cartailhac truly warns us, “Ce n’est pas, comme on l’a dit À tort, le dÉbut de l’art que nous dÉcouvrons. L’art de l’Âge du renne est beaucoup trop ancien.”[14]

And here it may well be objected, if the New Stone Age does not disclose any priority of implement, why further pursue what thus must be the insoluble? Why, indeed, especially if it be true that their tackle with some additional devices merely shows up as a development and improvement of that of their predecessors, to whom in point of time they surely stand nearer than any other known race?

The objection is pertinent. But, startling as the statement may seem, there now exist, or have within the last century existed, races, who in the actual material, and in the mode of fashioning, of their weapons are, in the opinion of experts, nearer akin to and resemble more closely PalÆolithic than did Neolithic man.

Speaking of the Eskimos, Cartailhac simply summarises the evidence of many authorities, when he writes “the likenesses in the above points are so striking that one sees in them the true descendants of the Troglodytes of Perigord.”

Professor Boyd-Dawkins goes farther. He finds the Eskimos so intimately connected with the Cave Men in their manners and customs, in their art, especially in their method of representing animals, and in their implements and weapons, that “the only possible explanation is that they belong to the same race: that they are representatives of the Troglodytes, protected within the Arctic circle from those causes by which their forbears had been driven from Europe and Asia. They stand at the present day wholly apart from other living races, and are cut off from all by the philologer and the craniologist.”[15]

Food supply probably effected the migration of the Eskimos, or rather of their ancestors from Europe.[16] At the close of the last ice age, as the ice cap retreated Northwards, the reindeer followed the ice, and the Eskimo followed the reindeer.

Of the aborigines of Tasmania Professor E. B. Tylor testifies: “If there have remained anywhere up to modern times men, whose condition has changed little since the early Stone Age, the Tasmanians seem such a people. Many tribes of the late Stone Age have lasted on into modern times, but it appears that the Tasmanians by the workmanship of their stone implements represent rather the condition of PalÆolithic man.”[17]

Sollas goes even farther: “The Tasmanians, however, though recent were at the same time a PalÆolithic or even, it has been suggested, an Eolithic race: they thus afford us an opportunity of interpreting the past by the present—a saving procedure in a subject where fantasy is only too likely to play a leading part.”[18] But their usual technique is against Eolithicism.

If these authoritative statements be accurate, can we not hazard a shrewd conjecture from examination of the implements and of the methods prevalent amongst the backward or uncivilised tribes closely resembling our Cave Dwellers, as to which was probably the first implement or method employed for catching fish? Can we, in fact, from the data available from the Eskimos, Tasmanians, and other similar races so reconstruct our men of Dordogne and elsewhere as to adjudge approximately whether first in their hands at any rate was the Spear, the Hook, or the Net?

Such a quest seems one of the incidental motives of G. de Mortillet in Les Origines de la Chasse et de la PÊche, 1890, which modifies in several particulars his earlier Les Origines de la PÊche et de la Navigation, 1867. We find from his pages and those of Rau’s Prehistoric Fishing (1884), and of Parkyn’s Prehistoric Art (1916), that a comparative examination of the above races, as it ramifies, discloses not only a close resemblance to PalÆolithic Man in the material, nature, and fashioning of their tackle, but also in their art and method of expressing their art.

Such similarity of art, evident in the Eskimos, stands revealed by the Bushmen of Africa (especially in the caves formerly used for habitations by the tribes of the Madobo range) in no less obvious or striking degree. “The nearest parallels to the finer class of rock carvings in the Dordogne are in fact to be found among the more ancient specimens of similar work in South Africa, while the rock paintings of Spain find their best analogies among the Bushmen.”[19]

The Africans, it is true, perfected their engravings on the surface of the rocks more frequently by “pecking.” But both they and PalÆolithic man make free and successful use of colours, of which the African possesses six as against the three or four of his European brethren. Each race depicts fish and animals so life-like as to be easily identifiable.

What evidence as to priority do the Eskimo methods of to-day yield us? Cartailhac but echoes Rau, Salomon Reinach, and Hoffmann[20] in his assertion that the prehistoric Reindeer Age compares practically with the actual age of the Eskimos. Their fishing spears in material, shape, and barb resemble the PalÆolithic.

Their carvings and engravings of fishing and whaling scenes on bone and ivory show clear kinship to the Dordognese.

Hoffmann’s able study of the Eskimos not only brings out these similarities, but also specially notes the closeness with which they observe and the exactitude with which they render anatomical peculiarities of fish and animals. As portrayers of the human form, on the other hand, they must be reckoned far from expert. The caves of France and those of Spain in general, although the paintings of the human form at Calapata and other places are far more finished and far more frequent than the French drawings, disclose curiously the same power and the same deficiency as characteristic of Troglodyte art.[21]

No race probably in the world depends so greatly on fishing for a livelihood as the Eskimos. From them, if from any, we should derive most light and leading. With them the Spear and the Hook form the chief, and till recently probably the only, tackle. Nets, on account of the ice, play little part. To any claim for precedence of the former over the latter, a champion of the Net demurs on the ground of climatic conditions, which he not unreasonably urges prevent any proper analogy in this respect being drawn between them and our Cave Men.

Touching the similarity of the Tasmanian to the Troglodyte, Ling Roth amplifies, especially as regards the material, etc. of the Spear, the evidence contained in Tylor’s already quoted sentence. This in conjunction with Captain Cook’s earlier statement that the Tasmanians, while experts with the Spear, were ignorant of the use of a Hook, and, according to Wentworth, of a Net, would have gone far in helping our quest and in establishing the precedence of the Spear.

Unfortunately the evidence of Lloyd and others that these aborigines speared fish as a pastime, coupled with the fact that while they consumed crustaceÆ they abstained (probably from reasons of tabu or totem) from eating scaled fish, sharply differentiates their Kultur from that of our prehistoric fishermen “at whose bellies hunger was gnawing.”[22]

From Mexico, and especially from the representations in Yucatan, I had hoped for new factors helping to solve our problem. First, because these had so far escaped the meticulous examination of the Madelainian, and second, because they were the product of an ancient people, the Mayas, who ranked fish as an important item of their diet, and pursued fishing with the Spear and the Net.[23]

With the Aztecs, who in the thirteenth century inherited the Maya culture, now dated as regards their architecture back to the first three centuries a.d.,[24] the hook arrives, or rather appears. Aztec skill in fishing stands well attested. Their artificial fishponds or vivaria, and the importance which they attached to fish as a food extract favourable comment from Cortez.[25]

In spite of the pictographs, known as the Mendoza Codex,[26] being executed several centuries after the date I have roughly allotted myself, viz. 500 a.d., I cannot resist inserting two of these on account of their fourfold interest.

They show first, that Mexican lads received early in their teens education in fishing. Second, that the Aztecs were familiar with scoop nets. Third—and this surely will go to the heart of our Food Controller—that food was rationed. From the circles or dots we learn that the age of one youth depicted was thirteen, and from the two connected ovals marked with small dashes that his allowance of food consisted of two cakes or tortillas a meal. Fourth, by the symbol before his mouth, that the father is speaking. The symbol very roughly reminds us of the Assyrian system of signs which determine the nature or subject of a word, as the two hundred odd fish mentioned in Asur-bani-pal’s library at Nineveh signify.

But Mexico as a staff in our quest of priority breaks in our hands. The Museo Nacional a few years ago contained nothing of prehistoric fishing interest except perhaps a notched stone sinker. Greater disappointment still, the wealth of ancient Maya information from the monuments of Merida yields us sometimes fish, but never fishing scenes.[27] From ancient Peru I had hoped help, but neither the four massive tomes of Ancient Peruvian Art by A. Baessler, nor The Fish in Peruvian Art by Charles W. Mead vouchsafe it.

To the absence among the ancient Peruvians of any written language Mead attributes the very early arrival of conventionalism in art. In consequence of conventionalism, fish at the period reached are merely rendered as various designs, notably that of the “interlocked fishes,” i.e. a pattern of parts of two fish turned in opposite directions, a curious example of which may be found in Mead, Plate I. fig. 9. The mythological monster, part fish part man, in Plate II. fig. 13, compares and contrasts with similar Assyrian representations.

The tomes of The Necropolis of Ancon fail also to aid us. Among the hundreds of objects of Inca civilization depicted, nothing piscatorial, except some copper fishing hooks and a few spears, comes to view.[28] Joyce, however, gives a fishing scene depicted on a pot from the Truxillo district of the coast, which the author dates pre-Inca, or anywhere between 200 b.c. and a.d.[29]

From his book emerge two interesting points of comparative mythology. The first—which compares with Assyrian and other similar legends[30] —the tradition that culture was first brought to Ecuador by men of great stature coming from the sea, who lived by fishing with nets; the second—which compares with the Egyptian practice—the custom among certain primitive coast tribes of placing provisions, among which were fish, in the graves of the dead.[31]

Other races of the world present many points of similarity to the French cave men. The Bushmen of Africa, and the Bushmen of Australia, inter alios, exemplify this. Banfield, in dealing with the drawings or so-called frescoes of men, animals, and fish on Dunk Island, vouches for the latter as “of talent, original and academic. Here is the sheer beginning, the spontaneous germ of art, the labourings of a savage soul controlled by wilful Æsthetic emotions.”[32]

This review of the fishing weapons and methods of the races cited—especially of the Eskimos and the Tasmanians, the races closest to the Troglodytes—provides data which make for a plausible conjecture, but none, owing to differing conditions caused by climate or custom, which enable a definite decision as to priority of implement.

Let us return from this survey of races to the cavernes and examine their contents.[33] Their dÉbris (at times ten feet deep and seventy long) manifests that these stations served as habitations for several generations of men.

From nearly all the French stations neighbouring the sea or rivers, bones of fish, especially of salmon, have been recovered. These have been identified, but not without some dissent, as belonging to the Tunny, Labrax lupus, Eel, Carp, Barbel, Trout, and Esox lucius.

The presence of the last, our pike, in this (and again in Neolithic) dÉbris excites our interest as evidence that the Troglodytes knew and made use of a fish whose absence, despite its wide geographical distribution, from all Greek and Latin literature until we reach the time of Ausonius, Cuvier, or more strictly Valenciennes, notes with extreme surprise.[34]

While in La Madelaine and elsewhere fish occur abundantly in the dÉbris, at some cavernes in the VÉzÈre Valley, notably Le Moustier, they cannot be traced. Their absence coupled with the presence of animal bones has led some archÆologists to the conclusion that Le Moustier and other stations were earlier inhabited than La Madelaine, at a time, in fact, when according to Paul Broca, “Man hunted the smaller animals as well as large game, but had not yet learned how to reach the fish.”

In addition to osseous deposits, numerous ichthyic carvings and engravings on materials and weapons present themselves. It is curious, however, to note that (at any rate up to 1915) of all the caves and grottoes two only, Pindal on the wall, and Niaux (the latest discovered French cave where black is the solitary colour employed) on the floor, furnish us with representations of fish on wall or floor.

TWO SEALS, DEAD TROUT, AND (?) EELS.

From Le bÂton de bois de renne de Montgaudier Museum.