FLY PROBABLY ARTIFICIAL—DAPPING 157 
To my mind, however, the scale dips deeply in favour of the 
artificial fly for the following reasons. 
1. The trend and purpose of the whole passage, especially 
when we note carefully the preceding verse and a half, ‘‘ Od 
dolosas munerum et malas artes. | Imitantur hamos dona,’ is to 
inveigh against fraudful gifts, typical of which fraudful flies 
are singled out—in fact, against all presents which are not 
what they appear. Mr. A. B. Cook writes: “I quite agree 
with your view that the passage gains much, if all three lines 
are made to refer to an artificial fly with a hook concealed in it. 
Indeed, that is pretty obviously the meaning.” 
2. The difficulty which the ancients would have experienced 
in impaling, etc., on one of their hooks a natural fly would have 
been greater than dressing an artificial one. The smallest 
hook in the Greek-Roman Collection at the British Museum 
(found at Amathus in Cyprus 1894) measures over } in. breadth 
at the bend.! If we allow that owing to oxidation the metal 
may have coarsened and swollen, the task of impaling, and 
further of fastening a natural fly securely enough to withstand 
the buffets of even wavelets of the sea (for N.B. the Scarus is 
Ancient Angling Authors, is so often regarded as a more or less modern method 
that, even at the risk of a portentous note, I must record my reasons for 
differing in toto from this view. Walton certainly employed it in the seventeenth 
century. Pursuing the device further back, it is distinctly enjoined in the 
earliest fishing treatise in English, the earlier version of The Boke of St. Albans 
(i.e. a MS. of about 1450 printed from a MS. in the possession of A. Denison, 
Esq., with Preface and Glossary by T. Satchell, London, 1883), and seems, 
although not clearly described, surely specified as follows: In “ How many 
maner of Anglynges that ther bene ... The IIIIth with a mener for the 
troute with owte plumbe or floote the same maner of Roche and Darse with a 
lyne of I or II herys batyd with a flye. The Vth is with a dubbed hooke for 
the troute and graylyng...’’ This passage draws a decided distinction 
between baiting with a fly and a dubbed hook, or artificial fly. But no lead 
(plumbe) or float was to be used, therefore the method intended seems without 
doubt ‘“ dapping,’’ which warrants, to my mind, the assumption that this 
device is as old as the earliest instructions in English. This older form of the 
Treatise seems, it is true, to have differed slightly from the version used for The 
Boke of St. Albans in 1495. T. Satchell held that they both had a common 
origin in the ‘‘ bokes of credence,”’ which are mentioned in the latter, and may, 
he suggests, have been French, but of this I am doubtful, principally because 
the French and English traditions appear to me to have marked points of 
difference. 
1 The two smallest perfect hooks scale about No. 10 and No. 11 respectively 
in the old, and 5 and 4 in the new numbering. They are considerably smaller 
than the Kahun (XII Dynasty) hook, which Petrie believes to be the smallest 
known in ancient Egypt. Cf. his Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 f. 
But the Kahun hooks scale Nos. 9 and 6 respectively. 
