PRIMITIVE FISH-BELIEFS. 3 



was so fond of fishing that he called himself Neptune. The 

 Emperors of Rome practised it with every circumstance of 

 characteristic luxury : their nets were of purple silk, and 

 the ropes of gilt twine. It is true that " from time im- 

 memorial " the Emperors of China had gone a-fishing, and 

 not less a fact that Gulliver found folk fishing both in 

 Brobdingnag and in Liliput. " But the people of the 

 former country did not care for sea-fish ; they were all 

 the ordinary size. Sometimes, though, they caught a 

 whale, and I have known them so large that a man could 

 hardly carry one upon his shoulders ; and sometimes, for 

 curiosity, they are brought in hampers to Lorbrulgrud." 

 What they caught in Liliput he does not tell us, 



Izaak Walton — "that quaint old coxcomb" — I know, 

 amuses himself by surmising that Seth, the son of Adam, 

 taught his son to cast a fly, and that he engraved the 

 mystery of the craft upon those pillars of which Masons 

 and Mormons know so much. But the world in general 

 will hardly be content to believe that the patriarch really 

 occupied so much valuable surface with the details of 

 fishing, and will prefer to accept the imperial masters of 

 Rome as the first of gentlemen anglers, and the fascinating 

 Cleopatra as the first of the fair sex who made angling a 

 feminine fashion. 



Apart from their historical records, the fishes have held 

 a really important place in the world's attention from the 

 beginning of time. This, at any rate, is beyond doubt, that 

 the oldest folk-lore extant, the Buddhist, abounds in morals 

 and significances drawn from the finny race, and that one of 

 the oldest of worships, the Phallic, finds under the symbol 

 of these creatures a conspicuous expression. Wherever wc 

 go in the East, we find them in Art and Literature per- 

 petually recurrent. It was in the First Age of the World 



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