2 Fish Stories 



Island was found a fish-hook manufactory, with hooks in 

 various stages, with the tools, showing that these ancient 

 islanders bored holes in pieces of abalone and broke off the 

 rim to form the hooks. 



Doubtless we took our love of fishing from some remote 

 Simian ancestor, if we are to believe one of the ancient 

 writers, who carefully describes monkeys in Africa holding 

 a bait in their prehensile tails, using the latter as a rod. 

 There is one weak point about this: the African monkeys 

 nowadays have no tails to speak of, and the tails they have, 

 are not prehensile ; true, the fishes may have bitten them off. 

 The nature writer of the last century tells us that the jaguar 

 waves its tail in the water to attract fishes. According to 

 Uncle Remus, it was through such acts as this that the rab- 

 bit lost his long bushy tail. Whether the jaguar used a 

 sinker, or what the bait was, is not given, but the honest 

 angler perhaps asks too much in pressing these points. 



There are many references to fishing in the Bible, and the 

 fondness of Jesus for fishermen is well known. *' I go a- 

 fishing " is Biblical, not Shakespearian, and from the miracu- 

 lous draught, to the catch of Tobias, the Bible contains refer- 

 ence to fishing. The greatest fish story in the world, the 

 experience of Jonah, is found in the Bible; also in Greek, 

 Egyptian and Babylonian mythology. True, the whale is 

 not a fish, but, on the other hand, the Higher Criticism 

 assures us that the fish in question was not a whale. Lin- 

 naeus tells us that it was the great white shark. Yet, doubt- 

 less, no fish story has been so widely circulated and univer- 

 sally believed as this. The good people of the ages have 

 accepted it without question. Once in a while, it is true, 

 some misguided scientist with an atrophied imagination rises, 

 and attempts to show that the throat of a whale is too small 

 to swallow a man, that a shark is too vicious to swallow him 

 whole, and that in either case, he would be smothered in ten 

 seconds; but such persons are swept aside by the splendid 

 faith of millions, who have had this fish story from their 



