40 INTRODUCTION 



hand fishing, and then, later, on fish elsewhere in a river. On 

 the latter, especially in the case of the salmon — in Phny's day 

 still abundant in Aquitania, which comprised the Loire and 

 many Palaeolithic cavernes — the weapon, even if as bident or 

 trident it had added unto itself a prong or two, would frequently 

 be found ineffective, owing to lack of prehensiHty. Hence 

 came about a modification, perhaps due either to the happy 

 chance of a spear on which a point or thorn had inadvertently 

 been left, or to the inventive faculty of some Troglodyte Hardy. 



We later reach a Spear Harpoon with barbs on one side only, 

 whence " line upon line," or rather barb upon barb, we attain 

 unto the later type, which had a barbed head so socketed as to 

 come free from the shaft (when the quarry has been struck) 

 but made fast to the head by a line for retrieving the fish. 

 In due, if differing, gradation we ultimately attain either unto 

 the existing device of the aboriginal Tsuy Hwan of Formosa, 

 an arrow shaped Uke a trident shot from but attached to a bow, 

 or unto le dernier cri, our whaling Harpoon shot from a gun. i 



Third comes fishing with a line of some sort. This was 

 devised doubtless by some hungry but perforce merely medi- 

 tative Magdalenian observing how dropped morsels were 

 seized by fish in a pool, whose depth or environment set at 

 naught both his hand and his spear. 



The problem how to reach and how to land them was eventu- 

 ally solved by the method — happily christened by Sheringham, 

 " Entanglement by Appetite " — of fastening a gorge through 

 or a thorn holding some kind of bait to an animal sinew, a 

 wythe, or a hardened thong of one of the whip-like alga. 

 This wythe or what not in the procession of the ages was 

 (according to Pepys) to betaper itself into the first English 

 catgut line of 1667, and (according to The Compleat Fisherman, 



* For a similar use of bow and harpoon arrow by the Bororo tribes in the 

 Amazon valley, see W. A. Cork, Through the Wilderness 0/ Brazil, p. 3S0. 

 Our gaff, a descendant, possibly, of the unilaterally one-barbed spear, seems 

 possessed of perpetual youth. The first description of its use in Angling in 

 England occurs, according to Mr. Marston {Walton and the Earlier Fishi)ig 

 Writers (1898), p. 97), in T. Barker's Art of Angling (1651), but according to 

 Dr. Turrell, op. cit., pp. 85 and gi, only in Barker's 2nd of i()57, " a good 

 large landing hook." From the definition, however, by Blount, Glossage, in 

 1657, "Gaffe, an iron wherewith seamen pull great Fishes into their ships," 

 its previous existence and employment at sea can be deduced. 



