VARIOUS BESURIPTIONS OF NETS. 213 



youths in the Latin language, which are yet preserved in 

 the Cottonian manuscripts, a fisherman is asked how he 

 secures his prey, and he answers, " I ascend my ship and 

 cast my net into the river ; I also throw in a hook, a bait, 

 and a rod f which shows that in the earliest periods of the 

 history of that country, nets of various kinds were employed 

 for entrapping fish; indeed, although St. Wilfred is said to 

 have taught the people of Sussex the use of the net 

 (probably an improved kind), such means have been em- 

 ployed in difi'erent ways from remotest times. Until late 

 years fishing nets have always been made by hand, and 

 generally tlie thread has been a more or less thick twine of 

 hemp, or flax, the thickness of the twine and the size of the 

 mesh depending upon the kind of fish for which it was made ; 

 recently, however, great improvements have been made in 

 the manufacture of nets, and machinery of the most beautiful 

 minute kind has been invented for the purpose. 



A great variety of nets are in use among fishermen, but the 

 principal are the seine, trawl, and drift nets. The first is a 

 very long but not very wide net, one side of which is loaded 

 with pieces of lead, and consequently sinks; the other, 

 or upper, is buoyed with pieces of cork, and is consequently 

 kept on the surface of the water. Seines are sometimes 

 upwards of a thousand feet in length. When stretched out 

 they constitute walls of network in the water, and are made 

 to enclose vast shoals of fish. The trawl is dragged along 

 the bottom of the sea by the fishing-boat ; and the drift-net 

 is like the seine, but is not loaded with lead, and is usually 

 employed for mackerel fishing. In the two fishery exhibi- 

 tions at Arcachon and Boulogne in France, several years 

 ago, a number of curious implements for the capture of the 

 inhabitants of the deep were shown. In one corner were 

 curious tongs for taking eels. Long stretches of netting for 

 the sardine fishery, woven with thread so fine that it might 

 be used for the manufacture of ladies' hose, Avere festooned 



