42 INTRODUCTION 
Even this very up-to-date device is no new invention. In 
the Malayan Archipelago and many Melanesian islands a kite 
has long been employed, sometimes as in the Solomon group, with 
a hookless bait of a spider’s web, which, as wool with eels, 
gets itself firmly entangled in the small teeth of the Gar fish.! 
Next arose, as snags and obnoxious branches in primitive 
days abounded, and water bailiffs did not, the further crux, 
not quite unknown even to-day, how to get the bait over the 
intervening obstacles which the mere hand line was incapable 
of clearing, or how to obtain the length necessary to place 
the bait properly before the fish.? 
The difficulty was in time overcome by attaching the 
tackle, wythe, gorge, and bait to the hunting Spear. It is at 
this stage I claim that the hunting Spear with wythe, gorge, 
and bait so attached became, in fact for all purposes was, the 
original pole, or at any rate was the immediate sire by a more . 
springy sapling of what in the procession of the ages was to 
attain unto the “tremendous,” if at times unmastered, 
“majesty ’’ of our modern Rod. 
Last of all, I suggest, though the evidence is conflicting, 
comes fishing by Net. If Tylor,? Calderwood,4 and others 
volume (Tales of Fishes (London, 1919), p. 39) we read of a swordfish, that 
‘‘ when he sounded, he had pulled thirteen hundred feet off my reel, although 
we were chasing him (in a motor boat) full speed all the time ” ! 
1 See the excellent monograph on “ Kite-Fishing,” by Henry Balfour, in 
Essays and Studies, presented to Wm. Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), p. 23, where he 
regards the invention as ancient and probably proto-Malayan. This hook was 
usually made of wood and the claw of a bird. Cf. Man, 1912, Art. 4, and 
case 42 in Ethnographical Collection at the British Museum. 
3 De Mortillet, pp. 245, 249: ‘‘ De tous les engins la ligne est le plus simple, 
et celui qui a du étre le premier employé.” He sums up his surview of the 
world from China to Peru, by ‘' La péche a la ligne est la péche la plus repandue 
parmi les nations sauvages.” 
3 Op. cit., “‘ The Net is known to almost all men as far as history can tell.” 
But Darwin, in The Cruise of the Beagle, found the Fuegians without Nets or 
traps of any kind. Their only methods of fishing were with Spears, and a 
baited hair line without any hook. 
4 The Life of the Salmon, p. xv, London, 1907: ‘‘ At once the most primi- 
tive and most deadly method of catching fish, which inhabit rivers, is the 
erection of built barriers and enclosures.” Plutarch (De Sol. Anim. 26) 
has no doubt of the priority of the Line over the Net: “ Fishermen when 
perceiving that most of the fishes scorned the line and hook as stale devices 
or such as can be discovered, betook themselves to fine force and shut them up 
with great casting nets, like as the Persians serve their enemies in their wars ” 
—caynveterv—(Cf. Herodotus, vi. 3) “to sweep the whole population off 
the face of a country” (Hollands’ Trs.). W. v. Schulenburg, Mdrktsche 
