HOOKS. FLINT, BONE, THORN, GOLD 35 



to have been thorn ^), and is the case even now with our 

 fishermen in Essex and the Mohave Indians in Arizona. 2 



The suggestion that the choice of material was generally 

 prompted by abundance or proximity of supply seems reason- 

 able. But it must not be pushed as far as the assumption 

 (of which a glance at the evidence as to material adduced by 

 Joyce detects the absurdity) that, because gold was very 

 abundant in Columbia and because gold fish-hooks have been 

 unearthed in Cauca and elsewhere, the primitive angler of 

 that country employed gold as the chief constituent of his 

 hook ! ^ 



Nor, again, is it possible for me to dwell on the evolution 

 or in some countries the possible pari passu development of 

 the single into the double hook (mentioned in England first in 

 The Experienc'd Angler of Venables, 1676), nor yet to trace 

 the various stages by which the simple bone or tusk hook of 

 Wangen or Moosseedorf blossomed out into the barbed metal 

 hook of the Copper Age.^ 



The Spear-Harpoon and some points of reindeer horn alone 

 remain for consideration. Opinion is divided as to the nature 



^ See infra, p. 357. 



2 My own Mohave Rod is of 'ihora, the red willow of that district, barked 

 and straightened by an ingenious Indian method. The line is of the prepared 

 bast of 'ido, another species of willow, and the hook of barrel cactus thorn. 

 Hooks made out of Echinocactus wislizeni are better adapted for fish which do 

 not nibble at the bait, but bolt it hook and all ; for this reason the Indians 

 fasten the bait below the hook (E. Palmer, "Fish-hooks of the Mohave Indians," 

 Amerian Naturalist, vol. xii. p. 403). On the north-west coast the Indians 

 a generation ago invariably used spruce- wood for their halibut hooks (Rau, 

 p. 139). Some Maori hooks are of human bone and pawa, with kiwi feathers. 



* I do not think that these gold hooks were a unit of currency, as the lari 

 of the Persian Gulf were, according to W. Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic 

 Currency, etc. (Cambridge), 1892, p. 276. 



This gold hook must not be confounded with the silver hook not infrequently 

 employed in the remoter districts of Great Britain by certain anglers, who in 

 their anxiety to avoid being greeted with Martial's " ecce redit sporta piscator 

 inani," cross with silver the palm of more fortunate brethren, and 



" Take with high erected comb 

 The fish, or else the story, home 

 And cook it." 



* See R. Munro's Lake Dwellings of Europe, pp. 127, 499,- 509. Flinders 

 Petrie, Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 f.,has a section on fish-hooks 

 with good illustrations, pi. 44, figs. 61-87, pi. 43, figs. 59, 60, 88-102. " Con- 

 sidering how much the Lake-dwellers relied upon fishing, the moderate number 

 of hooks found points to their depending more on nets. The few copied here, 

 88-94, ^re merely rounded, without any peculiar form." 



