xii Introduction. 



lands ; Book II. of the management of cattle ; 

 Book III. of the fmaller animals of a farm hares, 

 dormice, etc. The poem (afcribed to Ovid) on fifh- 

 ing (" Halieuticon"), is merely a fragment, yet con- 

 tains many fpirited lines, and the wiles of the lupus 

 to efcape from the hook as there defcribed are the 

 fame which have frequently been experienced by the 

 modern falmon and trout fifher, when the fifh 



" in auras 

 Emicat, atque dolos faltu deludit inultus." 



The vaft compilations of Pliny, A.D. 79, avow- 

 edly intended for a book of reference, have proved 

 a mine of wealth to all fucceeding writers on 

 natural hiftory. They are very uncritical ; Pliny's 

 chief anxiety apparently having been that no mo- 

 ment mould be wafted, and that everything which 

 he heard mould at once be reduced to writing. 

 Nemefianus wrote on hunting, fifhing, and navi- 

 gation. Some three hundred lines only of his 

 poem on the fir ft of thefe fubjects have been pre- 

 ferved. Much that is interefting may be found 

 in Martial's " Epigrams." Mr. Simcox fpeaks of 

 the " carefling defcriptions " of Apuleius, A.D. 163 ; 

 a few pearls may be collected from the depths 

 of his rhetorical fea. Juvenal here and there, in 

 his gloomy pictures of Roman fociety, throws in 

 a brighter tint which he has felected from what 

 may be called the natural hiftory of his day. All 

 fcholarly fimermen know that charming idyll of 

 Aufonius on the Mofelle. He was evidently an 

 angler, to judge from the fpirited and life-like de- 

 fcriptions of fifh and fifhing which he introduces. 



