ANCIENT ANGLING AUTHORS 25 



one of his family the credit of the importation of 

 this fish. There were four editions of A Booke of 

 Fishing (1590, 1596, 1600, and 1606), and a reprint 

 was published by Mr Satchell in 1884. 



There is a copy of the first edition of MascalPs very 

 scarce book in the British Museum. On the title- 

 page there is a small woodcut, representing a man 

 sitting on the left bank of a small stream, fishing 

 with rod and line : on the opposite bank a man is 

 shown setting a " whippe or spring trappe." 



The angling portion of the work begins at page 3 

 and ends with page 23. Since it is practically 

 the same as the Treatyse of ffysshyng wyth an 

 Angle, from which it evidently has been copied, 

 no comment upon it is necessary, save perhaps the 

 observation that it contains no acknowledgment of 

 debt. 



The remainder of the work is very interesting, as 

 being the first notice of fish culture and the preserva- 

 tion of fish in the English language. It is very 

 doubtful how much of this is original. Mr Satchell 

 has proved in the preface to his reprint (1884) that 

 a considerable portion of it has been taken from 

 L? Agriculture et Maison rustique de M. Charles 

 Estienne, Docteur a Medicine. A Paris, ches Jacques 

 Du Poys, 1570. 



Indeed, Mascall acknowledges that he took some of 

 his books from " Stephanus in French," and it is by 

 no means unlikely that he also obtained informa- 

 tion from some Dutch author. The motives by which 



