fish. 663 



killuch of reeds, a carab, corrach, cw-c or bubast of hide, 

 a canoe or cymba, phasellus, baris, area, cibotus ; till 

 by degrees the lsestres, gaulos, hburnia?, &c. led to the 

 most improved ships, and by their means, navigation, and 

 commerce, and all the sciences and arts of social life were 

 established \ But the progress of such improvement must 

 have been very gradual, and in many places, where counter- 

 acting causes operate, none ever took place. There are in 

 the latitudes of extreme heat and cold, regions which, but for 

 the presence of fish, would be uninhabitable for man, and 

 in them he has never emerged from the condition of a 

 savage, or relapsed into it, when brought from more civilized 

 regions and compelled to reside there. On the sterile, snow 

 clad cliffs of Nova Zembla ; on all the northern coast of 

 Asia and America ; on Terra del Fuego in the south ; on 

 the Maldives, and the shores of Australia, the Mekrem and 

 Suahkim sands of the tropics, the wretched inhabitants are 

 almost restricted to an ichthyophagous life, and in some 

 places even that pittance is precarious. Hence the ancient 

 Indian and Gedrosian fish-eaters confined their industry 

 solely to a mode of preservation of fish, which may have been 

 like that of the present suahs on the Red Sea, who prepare 

 them in the form of balls, and dry them in the sun. 



Unconscious of the vast benefit the world was to derive 

 from navigation and commerce, it was probably, as Cuvier 



1 The log and peg is still used by the Coranas of South Africa, the 

 catamaran in Peru and in India, the hollow gourds on lake Chad in 

 Africa ; the balsa of seal skins on the coast of Chili ; the goma or baris 

 of bulrushes anciently, as now, on the Nile ; the killuch of reeds on the 

 Persian rivers ; the carab, corrach, cw-c or bubast, basket boats covered 

 with hides, by the Persian and central Asiatic nations, the Celtae and 

 others : all the others are different names of ancient canoes, till they 

 become more complex in structure, as the Celtic laestri, Phoenician 

 gaulos, and the ancient piratical liburnia? were. 



