FLY PROBABLY ARTIFICIAL— DAPPING 157 



To my mind, however, the scale dips deeply in favour of the 

 artificial fly for the following reasons. 



1. The trend and purpose of the whole passage, especially 

 when we note carefully the preceding verse and a half, " Odi 

 dolosas munenmi et malas artes. \ Imitantur hanios dona," is to 

 inveigh against fraudful gifts, typical of which fraudful Hies 

 are singled out — in fact, against all presents which are not 

 what they appear. Mr. A. B. Cook writes : "I quite agree 

 with your view that the passage gains much, if all three lines 

 are made to refer to an artificial fly with a hook concealed in it. 

 Indeed, that is pretty obviously the meaning." 



2. The difficulty which the ancients would have experienced 

 in impaling, etc., on one of their hooks a natural fly would have 

 been greater than dressing an artificial one. The smallest 

 hook in the Greek-Roman Collection at the British Museum 

 (found at Amathus in Cyprus 1894) measures over \ in. breadth 

 at the bend.i If we allow that owing to oxidation the metal 

 may have coarsened and swollen, the task of impaling, and 

 further of fastening a natural fly securely enough to withstand 

 the buffets of even wavelets of the sea (for N.B. the Scarus is 



Ancient Angling Authors, is so often regarded as a more or less modern method 

 that, even at the risk of a portentous note, I must record my reasons for 

 differing in toto from this view. Walton certainly employed it in the seventeenth 

 century. Pursuing the device further back, it is distinctly enjoined in the 

 earliest fishing treatise in English, the earher version of The Boke oj St. Albans 

 (i.e. a MS. of about 1450 printed from a MS. in the possession of A. Denison, 

 Esq., with Preface and Glossary by T. Satchell, London, 1883), and seems, 

 although not clearly described, surely specified as follows: In " How many 

 maner of Anglynges that ther bene . . . The Illlth with a mener for the 

 troute with owte plumbe or floote the same maner of Roche and Darse with a 

 lyne of I or II herys batyd with a fiye. The Vth is with a dubbed hooke for 

 the troute and graylyng . . ." This passage draws a decided distinction 

 between baiting with a fly and a dubbed hook, or artificial fly. But no lead 

 (plumbe) or float was to be used, therefore the method intended seems without 

 doubt " dapping," which warrants, to my mind, the assumption that this 

 device is as old as the earliest instructions in English. This older form of the 

 Treatise seems, it is true, to have differed slightly from the version used for The 

 Boke of St. Albans in 1495. T. Satchell held that they both had a common 

 origin in the " bokes of credence," which are mentioned in the latter, and may, 

 he suggests, have been French, but of this I am doubtful, principally because 

 the French and English traditions appear to me to have marked points of 

 difference. 



1 The two smallest perfect hooks scale about No. 10 and No. 11 respectively 

 in the old, and 5 and 4 in the new numbering. They are considerably smaller 

 than the I\ahun (XII Dynasty) hook, which Petrie believes to be the smallest 

 known in ancient Egypt. Cf. his Tools and Weapons (London, 191 7), p. 37 f. 

 But the Kahun hooks scale Nos. 9 and 6 respectively. 



