14 INTRODUCTION 



■ Since it is impossible to iix 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 ^Eneolithic 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 1st 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 spht-cane Rod, nor the " town-like Net " of Oppian, but 

 some simple device created by the insistent necessity of pro- 

 curing food. With our primitive ancestors, as with the com- 

 panions 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 authori- 

 tative than the Egyptian or Sumerian as to priority of 

 implement help the quest of Archaeologists. 



Blazing their trail backwards in the half-hght 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 store- 

 house, whence Neolithic Man drew and in the course of long 

 travel bettered his materials — the dwelling place of the Old 

 Stone Man. 



To this store-house we too must press, tarrying only at 

 the caches to note cursorily Neohthic betterment or invention. 

 The dwelUng place is one of many mansions, or rather of many 

 rude caverns dotted over Europe. 



