468 A Peculiar Mode of Fishing in the Thames. [Sess. 



at low water. The farmers allow the fishermen to cut these 

 thorns from the hedges, and women are employed to bait them 

 at the rate of one halfpenny per hundred, and they earn about 

 sevenpence a-day. The baits used are pieces of thick sand- 

 worms ; and the fish taken are flounders, plaice, whiting, cod- 

 lings, and many other species. You will see that the bait can 

 be swallowed with either the point of the thorn or the other 

 end foremost ; but the traction being at the base of the thorn, 

 the moment a strain is put on the line the wood becomes 

 fixed across the gullet of the fish, and the penetrating thorn 

 keeps it immovably in place. The fishermen maintain that 

 the thorns are quite as efficient as hooks, and cost them 

 nothing beyond the trouble of cutting. 



A somewhat similar form of gorge-hook is still used in 

 France for taking eels and other kinds of fish. It consists of 

 a needle sharpened at both ends, with the line fixed in the 

 middle. A worm is spitted on the needle, a little of the line 

 being covered by the bait. Going back to remote dates, in 

 the lacustrine dwellings in the Swiss lakes, among many 

 implements discovered, are fish-gorges made of bronze wire 

 called " bricoles." Going back to a still earlier date, we have 

 the stone fish-gorge, found in the valley of the Somme in 

 France, in a peat-bed twenty-two feet below the surface. The 

 age of this peat - bed has been variously estimated, — M. 

 Boucher de Perthes says 30,000 years. The late Sir Charles 

 Lyell and Sir John Lubbock, without too strict an adherence 

 to date, believed that this peat-bed represented in its forma- 

 tion " that vast lapse of time which began with the commence- 

 ment of the neolithic period." Later authorities deem it not 

 older than 7000 years B.C. In the centre a groove has been 

 cut, the ends of the stone rising slightly from the middle. It 

 must have been tied to a line, and this stone gorge was 

 covered with a bait : the fish swallowed it, and the gorge 

 coming crosswise in the gullet, the fish was captured. There 

 can be little doubt that this is the oldest form of fish-gorge 

 ever discovered. 



