FisuinG IncLuDEs ANGLING. 19 
tle is known; but I feel assured that they would rank higher 
in the “scale of entities” than the fourth class of vertebrate 
animals, accorded them by Cuvier, did all men of thought and 
science appreciate and pursue fishing. 
Fishing, as a term, is general; while angling is a special 
kind of fishing. The word angling is supposed to have been 
derived from the bend of the hook, forming an angle; but 
the origin or antiquity of the term is comparatively unim. 
portant now. It is sufficient to know that the art of angling 
“requires as much enthusiasm as poetry, as much patience as 
mathematies, and as much caution as housebreaking.” 
That field-sports were among the earliest and most respect- 
able pastimes of the ancients, we have abundant evidence 
from their poets and philosophers, such as Aristotle, Plato, 
Cicero, and Horace; and that angling was practiced “with 
much success and love of the sport is evident from the Hali- 
eutics of Oppian, the only Greck poem now extant on this 
subject ;” but we learn from Atheneus that several other 
writers had written treatises or poems upon fishing some 
centuries before the Christian era. 
“Fishing was a favorite pastime of the Egyptian gentle- 
man, both in the Nile and in the spacious ‘sluices, or ponds 
for fish,* constructed within his grounds, where they were 
fed for the table, and where he amused himself by angling,t 
and the dexterous use of the d7dent, a two-pronged spear for 
striking two fish at a time. These favorite occupations were 
not confined to young persons, nor thought unworthy of men 
of serious habits; and an Egyptian of rank, and of a certain 
age, is frequently represented in the sculptures catching fish 
in a canal or lake, with the line, or spearing them as they 
glided past the bank. Sometimes the angler posted himself 
in a shady spot by the water’s edge, and, having ordered his 
servants to spread a mat upon the ground, sat upon it as he 
threw his line; and some, with higher notions of comfort, 
used a chair, as ‘stout gentlemew’ now do in punts. The rod 
* Tsaiah xix., 10. t Isaiah xix., 8. 
