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THE AMEBIC AN NATURALIST [Vol. LV 



To attract the fish they use land reptiles. Although they live in a 

 state of great distress and misery, these people (God loves those who 

 reside at their family hearths) are satisfied with their lots and with 

 what they have. They are under the government of Zanzibar." 



Yule^^ cites Fortune and Dabry for the same custom in 

 China, which once more shows the wide distribution of 

 identical maritime customs from Zanzibar to China. 



The first kind of fishing has undergone all kinds of 

 changes in the very earliest Odoric manuscripts. Sir 

 John Mandeville, who cribbed so much out of Odoric, 

 tells of a fish-otter, instead of a cormorant, as the ani- 

 mal with which fish are caught. 



In that eountrj^ there be beasts taught of men to go into waters, into 



anon they bring up great fishes, as many as men will. And if men 

 will have more, they east them in again, and they bring up as many as 



It is interesting and important to observe that the 

 Italian version of Sir John Mandeville which came out 

 in 1491,15 ^^at is, one year before the discovery of Amer- 

 ica, has the same story, the French term loir for ''otter" 

 being here rendered by udria. The Latin version, of 

 about 1500,1* simply says: 



Tamed water dogs whom we call luteres, are here aplenty; every time 

 they are sent into the river, they bring out fish. 



The substitution is everywhere from Vincent of Beau- 

 vais, who in his "Speculum naturale," XX, 89, tells of 

 the same fish-otters with which fish are caught, but the 

 substitution is unquestionably older than Sir John Man- 

 deville 's, who would not have omitted the strange story 

 of the cormorant if he had found it in his copy of Odoric. 



12 Op. cit., pp. 55 f. 



13 Op. cit., p. 191. 



14 "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville," London, 1900, p. 136. 



10 "Tractate delle piu maravigliose cose e piu notabili," Venice, Nicolaus 

 de Ferrariis, 17 Nov., 1491, cap. CXLVII. 



i«"Johanni3 de Montevilla Itinerarius in partes Iherosolimitanas, " cap. 

 XXXI. 



