342 



The Primitive Fish-Hook. 



SHARPENED NEE 

 DLE USED FOR 

 CATCHING FISH 

 IN FRANCE. 



Not eels alone are taken with this needle, for M. 

 jde la Blanchere informs us that many kinds of fish are 

 caught with it in France. 



Any doubts as to the use of the Neolithic form of 

 fish-gorge must be removed when it can be insisted 

 upon that precisely this form of implement was in use 

 by our Indians not more than forty years ago. In 

 1878, when studying this question of the primitive 

 hook, I was fortunate enough to receive direct testi- 

 mony on the subject. My informant, who in his 

 younger days had lived among the Indians at the 

 head-waters of Lake Superior, said that in 1846 the 

 Indians used a gorge made of bone to catch their fish. 

 My authority, who had never seen a prehistoric fish- 

 gorge, save the drawing of one, said that the Indian 

 form was precisely like the early shape, and that the Chippewas 

 fished some with the hook of civilization, others with bone gorges 

 of a primitive period. 



In tracing the history of the fish-hook, it should be borne in mind 

 that an overlapping of periods must have taken place. By this is 

 meant, that at one and the same time an individual employed tools 

 or weapons of various periods. To-day, the Western hunter lights 

 his fire with a match. This splinter of wood, tipped with phospho- 

 rus, the chlorates, sulphur, or paraffine, represents the progress made 

 in chemistry from the time of the alchemists. But this trapper is 

 sure to have stowed away in his pouch, ready for an emergency, his 

 flint and steel. The Esquimau, the Alaskan, shoots his seal with an 

 American repeating rifle, and, in lieu of a knife, flays the creature 

 with a flint splinter. The net of the Norseman is to-day sunk with 

 stones or buoyed with wood, — certainly the same devices as were 

 used by the earliest Scandinavian, — while the net, so far as the 

 making of the thread goes, is due to the best modern mechanical 

 appliances. Survival of forms require some consideration apart from 

 that of material, the first having much the stronger reasons for per- 

 sistence. It is, then, very curious to note that hooks not made of 

 iron and steel, but of bronze, or alloys of copper, are still in use on the 

 coast of Finland, as I have quite recently obtained brass hooks from 

 Northern Europe such as are commonly in use by fishermen there. 



