SARGUS FISHING IN SHE-GOAT’S SKIN 241 
we have rendered more serviceable and better adapted to the 
requirements of fish more harried, and consequently more 
highly educated. 
The old devices, the old recipes were never entirely lost.1 
They continued to be handed down through the Middle Ages, 
and may be found in most of the collections of household 
recipes, such as those of Baptista Porta, Conrad Heresbach, 
and others. They naturally in the course of some thousand 
years got rather split up, or fell into abeyance ; it was not, in 
fact, till the seventeenth century that fairly full collections of 
them began to reappear. 
But except just to mention “ tickling,” an ancient device 
in both Oppian and Alian, we have room here only for four 
methods, all very quaint, either unknown or uncommon among 
twentieth-century fishers. 
The first, that by which the goat-herd annexes the Sargus, 
according to Oppian.? 
In hot weather it was, and still is, in Sicily the wont of the 
goat-herds to drive their flocks to some cool shallow of the sea. 
“Once upon a time ” one of them noticed that the savg? came 
round the goats in vast shoals. The reason for this—whether 
grasped in a moment by one great brain, or evolved by two or 
three generations of speculating herdsmen—was discovered 
to be the attraction of the male sargus by the smell of the female 
goat. 
So the reasoning goat-herd slays his nanny, puts himself 
inside her skin, and to perfect, I presume, the resemblance of 
the deception, “adjusts on his brows the horns!” Then he 
gently glides into the shallow, “ scatters the food full shower ”’ 
among the sargi hot on their amorous mission and, well! for 
the number that were slain by ‘“‘ The Sturdy Rod his latent 
Hand extends’ I refer you to the fourth book of the 
Halieutica ! 
Ichthyologists declare that the male savgus is very uxorious, 
and has at least one hundred wives always in close-herded 
attendance on him. As the words ‘“‘ unhappy lovers ” indicate 
? 
1 Cf. Apostolides, op. cit., p. 31. 
2 Bk. IV. 308 ff. Cf. lian, I. 23. 
