356 ON BIKD-NETS. 



Mr. J. E. Harting, in ^Ornithology of Shakespeare' (pp. 157, 158), 

 gives an excerpt from Markham's ^Hunger's Prevention' (1600), on 

 bat-fowling : — 



" First, there shall be one to carry the cresset of fire [the cresset light 

 was a large lanthorn placed upon a long pole, and carried on men's 

 shoulders — see Strutt's ' Sports and Pastimes,' introduction], as was showed 

 for the low-bell." Here follows an account of how you are to beat the 

 bushes, '^ which done, you shall see the birds which are raysed, to flye and 

 play about the lights and flames of the fier ; for it is their nature through 

 their amazednesse and aff^right at the strangenes of the light and the 

 extreame darknesse round about it, not to depart from it, but as it were 

 almost to scorch their wdngs in the same." 



This is a curious notion about the sound of the bell; but it accords 

 with the experience of the French Lark- catchers, who have an old tradition 

 that they are most fortunate on All Saints' and Christmas Eve because the 

 ringing of the church-bells so annoys the birds that they do not know where 

 they are flying. This is outside Paris. 



We find something of the same sort in fish ; for Jonathan Couch, in his 

 ' History of Fishes ' (vol. iv. p. 38), says of the Lake-Bream QAhramis hrama^ 

 Yarrell): — '^This Bream is considered a very shy fish ; and as their ordinary 

 habit is to swim in shoals, Nilsson informs us that in the season when the 

 fishery is carried on in Sweden, in some of the parishes near the lake where 

 these fish abound it is forbidden to ring the church-bells, that the noise may 

 not drive the fish away." 



Again, Yarrell says (^British Fishes,' vol. i. p. 316) of the Golden Carp 

 (^Cyprinus auratus, Linn.) : — " The Chinese call their fish with a whistle to 

 receive their food. I think it was Sir Joseph Banks who used to collect his 

 fish by sounding a bell ; and Carew, the Cornish historian, brought his grey 

 mullet together to be fed by a noise made with two sticks." This was in a 



