42 INTRODUCTION 



Even this very up-to-date device is no new invention. In 

 the Malayan Archipelago and many Melanesian islands a kite 

 has long been employed, sometimes as in the Solomon group, with 

 a hookless bait of a spider's web, which, as wool with eels, 

 gets itself firmly entangled in the small teeth of the Gar fish.* 



Next arose, as snags and obnoxious branches in primitive 

 days abounded, and water baiUffs did not, the further crux, 

 not quite unknown even to-day, how to get the bait over the 

 intervening obstacles which the mere hand Hne was incapable 

 of clearing, or how to obtain the length necessary to place 

 the bait properly before the fish.^ 



The difficulty was in time overcome by attaching the 

 tackle, wythe, gorge, and bait to the hunting Spear. It is at 

 this stage I claim that the hunting Spear with wythe, gorge, 

 and bait so attached became, in fact for all purposes was, the 

 original pole, or at any rate was the immediate sire by a more 

 springy sapUng of what in the procession of the ages was to 

 attain unto the " tremendous," if at times unmastered, 

 " majesty " of our modern Rod. 



Last of all, I suggest, though the evidence is conflicting, 

 comes fishing by Net. If Tylor,^ Calderwood,* and others 



volume (Tales of Fishes (London, 1919), p. 39) we read of a swordiish, that 

 " when he sounded, he had pulled thirteen hundred feet off my reel, although 

 we were chasing him (in a motor boat) full speed all the time " ! 



1 See the excellent monograph on " Kite-Fishing," by Henry Balfour, in 

 Essays and Studies, presented to Wm. Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), p. 23, where he 

 regards the invention as ancient and probably pro to-Malayan. This hook was 

 usually made of wood and the claw of a bird. Cf. Man, 1912, Art. 4, and 

 case 42 in Ethnographical Collection at the British Museum. 



2 De Mortillet, pp. 245, 249 : " De ious les engins la ligne est le plus simple, 

 et celui qui a du etre le premier employi." He sums up his surview of the 

 world from China to Peru, by " La pcche a la ligne est la peche la plus repandue 

 parmi les nations sauvages." 



' Op. cit., " The Net is known to almost all men as far as history can tell." 

 But Darwin, in The Cruise of the Beagle, found the Fuegians without Nets or 

 traps of any kind. Their only methods of fishing were with Spears, and a 

 baited hair line without any hook. 



* The Life of the Salmon, p. xv, London, 1907 : " At once the most primi- 

 tive and most deadly method of catching fish, which inhabit rivers, is the 

 erection of built barriers and enclosures.* Plutarch (De Sol. Anim. 26) 

 has no doubt of the priority of the Line over the Net : " Fishermen when 

 perceiving that most of the fishes scorned the line and hook as stale devices 

 or such as can be discovered, betook themselves to fine force and shut them up 

 with great casting nets, like as the Persians serve their enemies in their wars " 

 — aayy)V(:Viiv — (Cf. Herodotus, vi. 31) " to sweep the whole population off 

 the face of a country " (Hollands' Trs.). VV. v. Schulenburg, Miirkische 



