338 The Primitive Fish- Hook. 



depressing passage, had one of extraordinary malevolence. This 

 was couched nearly as follows: "Suppose you were translated only 

 some seven hundred years back, then, pray, what would you be good 

 for? Could you make gunpowder? You have, perhaps, a vague 

 idea that sulphur, saltpeter, and charcoal are the component parts, 

 but do you know where or how they are procured?" I forget 

 whether this dispiriting author was not equally harrowing in regard 

 to the youthful reader's turning off a spectroscope at a minute's 

 notice, or wound up with the modest request that you should try your 

 hand among the Crusaders with an aneroid barometer of your own 

 special manufacture. 



Still this question arises : Suppose you were famishing, though 

 fish were plenty in a stream, and you had neither line nor hook, 

 What would you do ? Now, has a condition of this kind ever 

 occurred ? Yes, it has, and certainly thousands of times. Not so 

 many years ago, the early surveyors of the Panama route suffered 

 terrible privations from the want of fishing implements. The rains 

 had rendered their powder worthless ; they could not use their guns. 

 Had they only been provided with hooks and lines, they could have 

 subsisted on fish. Then there are circumstances under which it 

 would be really necessary for a man to be somewhat of a Jack-of-all- 

 trades, and to be able to fashion the implements he might require, 

 and so this crabbed old book might, after all, act in the guise of a 

 useful reminder. There was certainly a period, when every man 

 was in a condition of comparative helplessness, when his existence 

 depended on his proficiency in making such implements as would 

 catch fish or kill animals. He must fashion hooks or something else 

 to take fish with, or die. 



Probably man, in the first stage of his existence, took much of 

 his food from the water, although whether he did or not might 

 depend upon locality. If on certain portions of the earth's surface 

 there were stretches of land intersected by rivers, dotted by lakes, or 

 bordering on the seas, the presence of shell-fish, the invertebrates or 

 the vertebrates, cetaceans and fish, to the exclusion of land animals, 

 might have rendered primitive man icthyophagous, or dependent for 

 subsistence upon the art of fishing. But herein we grapple at once 

 with that most abstruse of all problems, the procession of life. Still, 

 it is natural to suppose, so far as the study of man goes, when con- 



