96 FISH-CULTURAL ASSOCIATION, 
quent that one tribe in Egypt declared war against another for 
eating up her deities! Even the fun on a fishing excursion which 
our urchins now enjoy, Cleopatra, herself, practiced on Antony 
in her frolicsome mood, when she ordered her divers to put 
a salted fish on his hook, whereat ‘he pulled with vehement agi- 
tation. 
Thus she was used to take delight with her fair hand 
To angle in the Nile. 
PISCINE LORE AND LUXURY. 
I have made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Izaak Walton in 
Winchester Cathedral, and have made my homage to that “grand 
old man” and rare old fisher. I found that his remains were 
under a large black slab, in a chapel in the south aisle called 
Prior Silkstead’s Chapel. It was evening when I endeavored to 
decipher the poetic tribute to the ancient angler—“crowned with 
eternal bliss.” 
The cheerfulness of his disposition and the serenity of his 
mind gave to him ninety years of felicity, in the midst of great 
and good and yet sportive scholars and churchmen. I honor him 
as well for his pen as for his hook and line; as well for his grace 
of diction and his genial muse as for his many-colored flies; and, 
above all, for that lesson of equipoise which he teaches in his 
rambles after his favorite recreation. He teaches the contem- 
plative as well as the sportive quality of the art. 
But if any one should think that the literature of fishing be- 
gan with Izaak Walton let him read classic lore. It is as full of 
the details as it is of the fun and poetry of fishing. Arion rides 
upon a dolphin as easily as the bold Viking darts out of the 
Norse fjords in his war jegt. But neither the classic nor the ro- 
mantic past has any history or fancy equal to the reality of our 
deep-sea fishing, or to our artificial reproduction from the ovza- 
It is said by a clever writer on this theme, that the luxurious 
Romans achieved great wonders in the art of fish-breeding, that 
they were able to perform curious experiments with the piscine 
inhabitants of their aquariums, and that they were well versed 
in the arts of acclimatization. This writer alleges—that ‘“ the 
value of a Roman gentleman’s fish-pond in the palmy days of 
