ZEBU 
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of the people, inherited from their Spanish conquerors. While making the foregoing sketch 
in a blazing noonday sun, a young lad ran to fetch a chair for me, while a little black-eyed 
maiden held an umbrella over my head. She must have been the “ princesa” after whom 
the street was called! Often too was I invited to step into the houses, a reception very 
different from that which I had recently experienced at Kowloon. 
Off the southern entrance of the channel, between Zebu and Mactan, is the locality where 
so many specimens of that beautiful sponge called “ Euplectella” or “ Venus’s basket,” or 
by the people here “ regaderas,” have been found. Its exquisitely delicate skeleton, stripped 
of the yellowish pulpy matter with which it is covered, and showing a mass of silicious 
spicules looking like fine threads of spun glass, forms a much-admired ornament of natural 
history museums. The sponge is fished up by the natives from the bottom of the sea, 
by an ingenious apparatus, far better adapted for securing specimens of a fragile character 
than the heavy, clumsy dredge with which we were provided. 
As shown in the diagram, the Zebu dredge consists of two rods of bamboo, each 
about 9 yi feet long and half-an-inch in diameter, placed nearly at right angles to each other, 
so as to form the apex of a triangle. Each rod is armed with strong fish-hooks about 
thirty-six in number, 
and both are connected 
by slender rods of 
bamboo which act as 
stays. Bisecting the 
angle at the apex is 
a wooden stick about 
one inch in diameter, 
which acts as it were 
as the backbone of the 
whole apparatus, and 
is weighted at each 
end with a flattish stone, the inner one being about four inches square, the other, somewhat 
heart-shaped, from six to eight inches in diameter. Attached to the apex by a short piece of 
cord is another wooden stick about three feet long, weighted at the further end by a stone 
six inches square, and tied to this end is the strong line of Manilla hemp by which the 
dredge is managed from the boat. The fish-hooks measure about one inch across the bend, 
and are tied to the rods at a distance of three inches apart. 
Euplectella is found partially imbedded in the ooze at a depth of about 100 fathoms, 
and the fishermen, after lowering the dredge to that depth, pull it gently along the bottom for 
the space of an hour, when, raising it to the surface, they usually find from half-a-dozen to a 
dozen sponges caught on the hooks. The whole apparatus struck us as a very creditable 
specimen of native ingenuity. In the skilful hands of our makers of fishing-tackle, it might 
readily be converted into a portable folding instrument, for the use of the professional or 
