Io INTRODUCTION 
date (1660) dealing with fishing, Les Ruses Innocentes, which 
may be described (mutatis mutandis) as the counterpart of The 
Boke of St. Albans. 
The first four books are concerned with “‘ divers methods ” 
(of most of which the author, @ /a Barker, claims the invention) 
for the making and the using of all kinds of nets for the capture 
of birds, both of passage and indigenous, and of many kinds of 
animals. 
The fifth confides to us “les plus beaux secrets de la péche 
dans les Riviéres ou dans les Etangs.’’ As the secrets are 
concerned almost entirely with Net fishing, little light reaches 
us. Both the instructions and illustrations in chap. xxvi., 
Invention pour prendre les Brochets a la ligne volante, show 
that the line after being attached about the middle of the 
pole was twisted round and round till made fast at the 
end of the pole, from which depended some eighteen feet of 
line.! 
Setting conjecture aside and faced by the fact that the 
Egyptian line was certainly made fast at the top and that 
neither illustrations nor writings (so far as I have been able 
to discover) indicate any other condition, we are driven by a 
mass of evidence, negative though it be, to the conclusion 
that the ancients? and the moderns down to some date 
between 1496 and 1651 fished with “ tight ’’ lines. 
1 With good reason the author styles his work, ‘‘ Ouvrage trés curieux, 
utile, et recreatif pour toutes personnes qui font leur séjour a la campagne.” 
2 No example of a running line has ever been produced from either ancient 
hterature or ancient art, but on the other hand numerous illustrations of the 
tight line on vases, frescoes, mosaics, etc., are extant. To the examples 
collected by G. Lafaye in Daremberg and Saglio, Dict. des antiquités, iv. 489, ff. 
s.v. ‘ piscatio,’ can be added: (a) Ivory relief from Sparta, seventh century 
B.c., published by R. M. Dawkins in the Annual Report of the Brit. School at 
Athens, 1906-7, xiii. 100, ff., pl. 4. (6) Black figured lekythos from Hope 
Collection (Sale Cat. No. 22), published by E. M. W. Tillyard in Essays and 
Studies presented to W. Ridgeway, Cambridge, 1913, edited by E. C. Quiggin, 
p. 186, ff. with plate. (c) Greco-Roman gem in A. Furtwangler, Beschreibung 
dey geschnittenen Steine im Antiquarium (zu Berlin), Berlin, 1896, p. 257, 
No. 6898, pl. 51. Cf. the same author, Die Antiken Gemmen, Leipzig- 
Berlin, 1900, i. pl. 28, 25, and pl. 36, 5; ii. 140 and 174. A. H. Smith, Caz. 
of Engraved Gems in the Brit. Museum, London, 1888, p. 191, Nos. 1797-99, 
and p. 206, No. 2043. (@) Coins of Carteia in Spain, well represented by 
A. Heiss, Description générale des Monnaies antiques de l’Espagne, Paris, 1870, 
p. 331 f., pl. 49, 19-21. (e) Mosaic in Melos, see R. C. Bosanquet in the 
Jour. of Hell. Studies, 1898, xviii. 71 ff., pl. 1. (jf) Silver kyatey from Hilde- 
sheim shows Cupids with fishing rods and tridents catching all sorts of 
