48 INTRODUCTION 
Romans. The amount of space allotted to the last two, 
compared with that occupied by some of the other nations, may 
suggest the immortal even if apocryphal chapter of ‘‘ Snakes 
in Iveland.’’ ‘‘ There are none.” 
To any such criticisms I make answer that for nearly all 
our knowledge as to the methods and tackle of fishing and 
varieties of fish we are indebted to the Greeks and Romans, 
and in a smaller degree to the Egyptians and Chinese. 
Reasons of date, data, and dearth of paper prevent my 
using in this book the material which I had collected on Indian, 
Persian, and Japanese Fishing. 
As regards India, while fishing by net falls well within my 
adopted date (500 a.D.), that by hook and line—not necessarily 
Angling—gains entrance by a short head, or a mere century. 
Fish (matsya, apparently derived from the root mad and 
signifying the inebriated) is down to c. 1000 B.c. only mentioned 
once ! in the Rigveda, X. 68, 8. In the next period—that of 
the later Vedas and Brahmanas—fish, but not methods of 
capture, find frequent mention. 
The Net (ala) is first referred to in the Atharvaveda (not 
later than 800 B.c.) but not in connection with fishing, while in 
the Yajurveda (c. 800 B.c.) names for fishermen and a hook 
—badiSa—occur. The 139th Jdtaka (c. 400 A.D.) contains 
the first allusion to fishing with a dine and hook. 
References in Sanskrit poetry to the iron hook and bait 
probably imply, though they fail to mention, the Rod. 
Passages in the epic Mahabharata, V. 1106 (c. 200 A.D.), in Ka- 
mandaki’s aphoristic poetry (c. 300-400 A.D.), in the Panca- 
tantra, I. 208, “‘ when women see a man caught in the bonds of 
love, they draw him like a fish that has followed the bait,”’ 
all suggest Angling.? 
Fish legends, similes, stories—not always redounding to 
1In H. Grassmann’s Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda, twice. One cannot 
indict a whole sex for inebriety on the strength of a single passage, but fish, 
despite matsya being masculine in Sanskrit, are always feminine according to 
the Avesta (vol. v. p. 61, of Sacred Books of the East, Pahlavi Texts): ‘‘ Water, 
Earth, Plants, and Fish are female, and never otherwise.” 
2 For help and guidance as to India I am greatly in debt to my old Oxford 
friend, Dr. A. Macdonell, Boden Professor of Sanskrit, and to his two books, 
History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 143, and Macdonell and Keith, Vedic Index 
of Names and Subjects (London, 1912), vol. ii. p. 173. 
