2 INTRODUCTORY. 



who, putting aside prejudice and long-received 

 opinion, gives the matter his serious consideration, 

 can doubt this.* 



As to fish, the case was altogether different ; it 

 necessarily was at the Flood. There was no bond 

 of union or sympathy between them and man, no 

 natural dependence ; and his dominion over them 

 was strictly limited to his power of exercising it : 

 the fear of him and the dread of him were innate 

 in the fish, but neither love nor craving for pro- 

 tection, nor voluntary submission to his will. 



From very early, if not from the earliest times, 

 men seem to have enjoyed the pursuit and capture 

 of fish. We find angling in our oldest written re- 

 cords, in the perhaps still more ancient records of 

 the Egyptians. Job, in the earliest of our books 

 (unless the Pentateuch be still earlier), is asked, 

 " Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook, or 

 his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down ? " 

 Cleopatra, we are told, cajoled Mark Antony, 



* Abel was a keeper of sheep of domesticated sheep such sheep 

 as the Eastern shepherd has, ever since the actions of man were 

 recorded, led forth to the green pastures ; not of the Aoudad, the 

 wild type of the race, the active, unsubdued creature, still found in 

 numbers on Ararat and other mountains of the East. Job possessed 

 cattle and asses, but surely neither the bison nor the buffalo, the 

 quagga nor the zebra : untamed and untamable they then were 

 untamed and untamable they continue to the present day. 



