ANCIENT FISHINa-TACKLE. 23 



along the Persian Gvif, -who, deprived by the barrenness 

 oftheir country of all the more ordinary resources of sub- 

 sistence, were ichthyophagous by necessity. Fish indeed 

 was their only staple: they ate it raw, dried, or ground 

 down in whalebone mortars, into fish-meal bread, to feed 

 first themselves and then the cattle, not having any 

 meadows or pastures for grazing; their bodies were pro- 

 tected from the weather by fish-skin dresses, and they 

 lived in huts, the beams, rafters, walls, windows and 

 doors of which were formed from the skeletons of le- 

 viathans, reconstructed and articulated anew. This 

 wretched people, always on the verge of starvation, and 

 entirely dependent upon what the waters suppUed for 

 shelter, covering, and food, although apparently indiffe- 

 rent to their uncomfortable position, or too apathetic to 

 make any efforts at improving it, could exhibit a park 

 of nets capable of covering, says their historian, two 

 stadia, or a quarter of a mile of sea; and, what is more 

 remarkable, these were not made of twine, for hemp and 

 flax were unknown in the land, but from the inner bark 

 of palm-trees; being, in fact, papyrus nets.* If these 

 barbarians, reaUy such, obtusely uninventive in all other 

 matters for the amelioration of social life, and without 

 even proper materials for the work, succeeded in manu- 

 facturing the noble apparatus of meshwork chronicled 

 by Arrian, what perfection in the retiary art might we 

 not expect in the hands of people so highly civilized, so 

 subtle, and so fond of fish as the ancient Greeks and 

 Romans? It would be easy here to spin a long yam, 

 Xivov Xivtp (nwdirreiv, sufficient to enclose both ourself 

 and reader in all the detours of a vast, wide, intricate, 



* Other materials than twine are still used occasionally in the 

 fabrication of nets : ' En Provence on fait quelques gros [filets 

 avec I'auffe; les Groenlandais avec les barbes de haleine. Les 

 Indiens de I'isthme de I'Am^rique pSchent avec de granda filets 

 d'^corce de mahot.' — LacSpide. 



