SPONGE-FISHING. 
549 
sponges up with a three-pronged fork provided with a very long wooden handle. 
Each boat carries a varying number of small dingheys. Two men are apportioned 
to a dinghey, one for sculling, the other for hooking. The hooker leans over the 
side, and views the surface of the reefs through a sponge-glass. Great skill is 
required in sponge - fishing; indeed, the difficulty of hooking up a small dark 
object in twenty or thirty feet of water, and often in a strong current, can be 
imagined. Once a week the fleet returns to some selected locality to unload its 
cargo into a crawl,—a staked enclosure covered with a few feet of water. The 
preceding week’s catch, with the skin and fleshy matter almost rotted off, is now 
beaten, squeezed, hung in strings to dry in the sun, and finally packed in bales, 
and sent to Nassau and Key West. Sponges used to be sold by weight, but owing 
to the tendency to absorb moisture, and to the prevalence of the fraudulent 
practice of weighting them with sand, they are now valued according to size, 
shape, quality of fibre, etc. The fine toilet-sponge is found chiefly along the 
eastern shores of the Mediterranean, from Trieste round by the Levant to Tripoli. 
The distribution of the bath-sponge extends from East Greece, along the Levant 
and the North African shore, and the zimocca-sponge from the Levant to Tripoli. 
Good qualities of commercial sponges grow in the Red Sea; the Great Barrier 
Reef off the north-east of Australia would probably yield a large supply. The 
bulk of the harvest of sponges from Bahamas and Florida consists of common 
bath-sponges. 
R. KIRKPATRICK. 
