54 FISH CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
American fishing implements of former periods are rare. I 
know of but one hook, which figures in Mr. Charles Rau’s pub- 
lication, issued by the Smithsonian Institution. This hook, 
which was of bone, was found at Santa Cruz, California. It 
has traces of asphaltum sticking to it where the line was 
secured. The peculiarity of this hook is that the barb is out- 
side, not inside, of the bend. It resembles very closely the 
hooks used by the natives of Polynesia. Bronze hooks, or in 
fact any instruments of an alloyed metal, have not been dis- 
covered on the American continent. All such implements as 
have been found are made of pure copper. There are certain 
forms of stone, round disks, with a hole pierced through them, 
which might have served as sinkers for nets or lines; but as 
they may have been used for ornaments as pendants, or for 
wearing, it is doubtful whether they were employed in fishing. 
I shall conclude this most brief notice by asking you to 
look at a barbed bone, a harpoon in fact, coming from a cave in 
France. This belongs to an age not as old as the stone period, 
following it, however, but immensely remote from the bronze 
era. I could not pretend to give you its age, any more'than I 
could the flint of the stone period. What is curious about this 
harpoon-head, is that it is precisely like the bone implements 
found in Indian graves in Michigan and Alaska, and is the coun- 
terpart of the bone-harpoon in use to-day by the Esquimaux. 
Thinking over the discovery of such bone-harpoons in Switzer- 
land, in Dordogne, in France, we cannot but help arriving at 
other deductions. If hooks were used for fish, these harpoons 
certainly were not. These hooks are implements which served 
man’s purposes but yesterday—a yesterday of four thousand 
years distant, it is true; while these bone-harpoons were em- 
ployed to impale creatures which do not exist to-day in the 
localities where these weapons were discovered. Seals and 
cetaceans, huge animals, marine or terrestial, certainly abounded 
in the former country, which bore more resemblance to Green- 
land than it did to the Switzerland or France of to-day. 
I have been necessarily brief in referring to these old hooks 
of stone, bone, and metal. But see, by means of them, what a 
vast extent of time, long gone past, we pry into. These imple- 
