ANCIENT FISHING-TACKLE. 17 



requisite to the angler's craft^fish-hooks— an abundant 

 assortment, now in the museum at Naples, was disin- 

 terred at Pompeii; they vary extremely in form, size, and 

 mode of adjustment, and axe manufactured of two diifer- 

 ent metals; some, like our own, of steel {nucleus ferri*) 

 others, as we read in Oppian, of bronze, — 



' His hooks were made of haxden'd bronze and steel. 'f 



Owing to the maritime site of Pompeii, these hooks, 

 being exclusively adapted for sea-fishing, are generally 

 of coarse fabrication, large in size, long in shank, and 

 flattened at the top to facilitate attachment to the line, 

 like those used along our own coasts. Some of them are 

 two-barbed {^i'xar{Kay)(ive<;), others are fixed back to back 

 like eel-hooks, and fastened to wire, as in the modem 

 gorge-hook, to prevent the game snapping the hair. Of 

 those with a serpentine bend, which Plutarch recommends 

 for amia fishing, ' as these great fish,' says he, ' manage 

 to unhook themselves from straight ones,' we could find 

 no specimens; nor (to pass from Brobdignag to LUliput) 

 of that other kind mentioned by iElian, so small that 

 anglers baited them, not with a fly, but a gnat (conops), 

 which certainly carries the series of old Roman hooks 

 downwards far below our minimum size. No. 13, where- 

 on it would be impossible to impale a gnat. Some of the 

 larger of these hooks are leaded, the leads being formed 

 into conico-cyliudrical lumps shaped like dolphins, and 

 named Delphini after a certain rude resemblance to 

 that fish. From the excellence of their hooks it is safe 

 to infer (in spite of the absence of any direct informa- 



* Pliny. 



■f XaXKoO fikv (tkKtjpow TfTvy/icvov rjc triB-qpov. Observe the epi- 

 thet hard applied to the bronze, not the steel, for the ancient 

 bronze was made of tin and copper (not ziac and copper, as our 

 softer alloy), and was so hard, that Pliny tells us it could be 

 worked to represent the finest hairs of the human head. 



