HOOKS, FLINT, BONE, THORN, GOLD 35 
to have been thorn !), and is the case even now with our 
fishermen in Essex and the Mohave Indians in Arizona.? 
The suggestion that the choice of material was generally 
prompted by abundance or proximity of supply seems reason- 
able. But it must not be pushed as far as the assumption 
(of which a glance at the evidence as to material adduced by 
Joyce detects the absurdity) that, because gold was very 
abundant in Columbia and because gold fish-hooks have been 
unearthed in Cauca and elsewhere, the primitive angler of 
that country employed gold as the chief constituent of his 
hook ! 3 
Nor, again, is it possible for me to dwell on the evolution 
or in some countries the possible pari passu development of 
the single into the double hook (mentioned in England first in 
The Experienc’d Angler of Venables, 1676), nor yet to trace 
the various stages by which the simple bone or tusk hook of 
Wangen or Moosseedorf blossomed out into the barbed metal 
hook of the Copper Age.# 
The Spear-Harpoon and some points of reindeer horn alone 
remain for consideration. Opinion is divided as to the nature 
1 See infra, p. 357. 
2 My own Mohave Rod is of ’ihora, the red willow of that district, barked 
and straightened by an ingenious Indian method. The line is of the prepared 
bast of ’tdo, another species of willow, and the hook of barrel cactus thorn. 
Hooks made out of Echinocactus wislizeni are better adapted for fish which do 
not nibble at the bait, but bolt it hook and all; for this reason the Indians 
fasten the bait below the hook (E. Palmer, ‘‘ Fish-hooks of the Mohave Indians,” 
Amerian Naturalist, vol. xii. p. 403). On the north-west coast the Indians 
a generation ago invariably used spruce-wood for their halibut hooks (Rau, 
p. 139). Some Maori hooks are of human bone and pawa, with kiwi feathers. 
8 I do not think that these gold hooks were a unit of currency, as the Jari 
of the Persian Gulf were, according to W. Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic 
Currency, etc. (Cambridge), 1892, p. 276, 
This gold hook must not be confounded with the silvery hook not infrequently 
employed in the remoter districts of Great Britain by certain anglers, who in 
their anxiety to avoid being greeted with Martial’s ‘‘ ecce redit sporta piscator 
inani,”’ cross with silver the palm of more fortunate brethren, and 
“ Take with high erected comb 
The fish, or else the story, home 
And cook it.” 
4 See R. Munro’s Lake Dwellings of Europe, pp. 127, 499, 509. Flinders 
Petrie, Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 £., has a section on fish-hooks 
with good illustrations, pl. 44, figs. 61-87, pl. 43, figs. 59, 60, 88-102. ‘“‘ Con- 
sidering how much the Lake-dwellers relied upon fishing, the moderate number 
of hooks found points to their depending more on nets. The few copied here, 
88-94, are merely rounded, without any peculiar form.” 
