FISH AND ANTICHRIST—SUPERSTITIONS 59 
potentate who best fills the bill, or closest answers to the 
author’s Antichrist.! 
Space debars from one fascinating branch of my subject— 
the superstitions of Fishing. Their far-flung web enclosed the 
ancient piscator more firmly than his brother venator, or, 
indeed, any class save only the ‘‘ medicine men ’’ of Rome. 
Nor could their successors disentangle themselves, as 
witness the recipe given above by Bassus for inscribing on the 
limpets’ shell the Gnostic formula, and Mr. Westwood’s words, 
“There is, in fact, more quaint and many-coloured super- 
stition in a single page of Old Izaak than in all the forty-five 
chapters of the twentieth Book of the Geoponika. Silent are 
they touching mummies’ dust and dead men’s feet—silent on the 
fifty other weird and ghastly imaginations of the later anglers.” ? 
And even the modern angler, if he thoroughly examine 
himself, must confess that some shred of gossamer still adheres. 
Does he not at times forgo, even if he boast himself incredulous 
of consequence, some act, such as stepping across a rod, lest 
it bring bad luck? If particular individuals rise superior, the 
ordinary fisherman in our present day still avows and still 
clings to superstitions or omens. Let him in the South of 
Ireland be asked whither he goes, meet a woman, or see one 
magpie, and all luck vanishes. A dead hare (manken) regarded 
as a devil or witch a century ago brought piscator nigh unto 
swooning. 
Women seem usually fatal to good catches ; as one instance 
out of many we read in Hollinshed’s Scottish Chronicle, that 
“if a woman wade through the one fresh river in the Lewis, 
1S. Bochart, Hievozotcon (Leipzig, 1796), p. 868, telling of a fish whose 
right ear bore the words, There is no God, but God, and left, Apostle of God, 
and neck, Mahomet, concludes with a parody of Virgil, Buc., iii. 104. 
“Dic quibus in terris inscripti nomina Divum 
Nascantur pisces, et eris mihi magnus Apollo !”’ 
A magnus Apollo to graduate the claims of the different potentates would 
indeed be a boon. The capture of a fish some two years ago near Zanzibar 
with Arabic inscriptions—legible only by the faithful—caused immense excite- 
ment, as possibly foretelling the speedy end of the world. 
2 Angler's Note-Book, ii. p. 116. 
3 Angler's Note-Book, i. 44. 
* Dougal Graham, Ancient and Modern Hist. of Buckhaven (Glasgow, 
1883), vol. ii. p. 235. 
F 
