66 THE UNAPPRECIATED FISHER FOLK. 
old fishermen used to ride on the back of the fish within 
the circumference of the net ! 
The scenes to be witnessed in many of the Italian 
fish-markets are exceedingly grotesque, and the noise of 
quarrelling and the general loquacity that seems to be 
incident to the sale of the frutti della mare in the fish- 
market of Venice in the nineteenth century is of the very 
choicest order of “Billingsgate,’ and certainly cannot even 
be surpassed by the notorious fish-hawkers of Dublin of 
whom Dean Swift wrote— 
“ All mad to speak, with none to hearken— 
They set the very dogs a-barking ; 
No chattering makes so loud a din 
As fishwives o’er a cup of gin.” 
A large portion of the Italian population earn a livelihood 
by fishing, some of the men using the frailest of boats, craft 
which can only be used in the finest of weather. The number 
of men engaged in sea fisheries on December 31, 1869, 
with the exclusion of the then Papal States, was 60,000, 
employing 18,000 boats, and giving a mean annual produce 
of forty million lire. In addition to the sea fisheries, there 
are lagoon and estuary fishing industries, which employ 
many persons; whilst some of the fishing products, as the 
Sponge, Pinna and Coral, bear of course no relation to the 
food supplies. Asa matter of act Italy imports fish from 
Great Britain and other countries, to the extent of more 
than twenty-one million lire. 
Taking leave of Italy, we come to France, where a few 
hundred years ago many different laws were enacted for 
the regulation of /es potssardes; and they undoubtedly 
required to be legislated for, as they too were in the habit 
of exercising the same vehemence of rhetoric which is the 
