S ARGUS FISHING IN SHE-GOAT'S SKIN 241 



we have rendered more serviceable and better adapted to the 

 requirements of fish more liarried, and consequently more 

 highly educated. 



The old devices, the old recipes were never entirely lost.i 

 They continued to be handed down through the Middle Ages, 

 and may be found in most of the collections of household 

 recipes, such as those of Baptista Porta, Conrad Heresbach, 

 and others. They naturally in the course of some thousand 

 years got rather split up, or fell into abeyance ; it was not, in 

 fact, till the seventeenth century that fairly full collections of 

 them began to reappear. 



But except just to mention " tickling," an ancient device 

 in both Oppian and iElian, we have room here only for four 

 methods, all very quaint, either unknown or uncommon among 

 twentieth-century fishers. 



The first, that by which the goat-herd annexes the Sargus, 

 according to Oppian. 2 



In hot weather it was, and still is, in Sicily the wont of the 

 goat-herds to drive their flocks to some cool shallow of the sea. 

 " Once upon a time " one of them noticed that the sargi came 

 round the goats in vast shoals. The reason for this — whether 

 grasped in a moment by one great brain, or evolved by two or 

 three generations of speculating herdsmen — was discovered 

 to be the attraction of the male sargus by the smell of the female 

 goat. 



So the reasoning goat-herd slays his nanny, puts himself 

 inside her skin, and to perfect, I presume, the resemblance of 

 the deception, " adjusts on his brows the horns ! " Then he 

 gently glides into the shallow, " scatters the food full shower " 

 among the sargi hot on their amorous mission and, well ! for 

 the number that were slain by " The Sturdy Rod his latent 

 Hand extends " I refer you to the fourth book of the 

 Halieutica ! 



Ichthyologists declare that the male sargus is very uxorious, 

 and has at least one hundred wives always in close-herded 

 attendance on him. As the words " unhappy lovers " indicate 



^ Cf. Apostolides, op. cit., p. 31. 

 ••' Bk. IV. 308 ff. Cf. ^Elian, I. 23. 



