A BAIT OF “ FIFTY WHOLE OXEN!” 457 
coincide. As the former lived not two centuries later than the 
Father of History, the tip had possibly just reached China 
from Egypt—‘ from Africa comes ever something new ’’— 
viz. the chine of a porker for a crocodile. 
The story runs that Tzii-sst, a grandson of Confucius, 
witnessed the landing from the Yellow River of a fish “‘ as big 
as a cart.”’ The fishermen had baited first with bream, but . 
as the monster, like the law, de minimis non curavit, they 
substituted half a sucking pig with instantaneous success. 
But the bait handed down to us by Chuang Tzit (fourth 
century B.c.), if it faintly recall, completely eclipses “the 
lungs of a wild bull,’ which lian recommended for the 
capture of the Silurus, in that it was no less an one than 
“ fifty whole oxen!’ 1 
As a producer and as a user of Nets, China ranked and 
ranks perhaps higher than any country. The number and 
variety of Nets in Julius Pollux can well be matched, while the 
Oppianic opulence of 
“A thousand names a fisher might rehearse 
Of Nets, intractable in smoother verse,” 
meets its peer, if not its superior in Scarth, Gray, or Dabry de 
Thiersant,2 who devotes thirty-five pages to what Plutarch 
terms these “‘ engines of encirclement.” 
If the Net proper, the barrage, and the fish fence sprang 
from the same parent,’ then in China the fish fences of bamboo, 
erected for catching and spawning purposes, should be in- 
cluded in the term Net.* 
If this be the case, the Chinese stand out as experts both in 
the diversity and the ingenuity of their devices. Passages 
from old Chinese authors justify this appreciation.’ They are 
too numerous for quotation here, but three or four seem worthy 
of notice. 
1 Antea, p. 243. 
2 La Pisciculture et la Peche en Chine (Paris, 1872) was written, not by a 
globe-trotter, but by an expert sent out by the French Government to report 
fully on Fishing in China. 
3 See antea, p. 43. ; 
4 Legge speaks of the Nets being made of very fine bamboo. 
5 Werner, op. cit., 280 ff. 
