THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST, 115 
FISHING APPLIANCES FROM OCEAN AND 
PLEASANT ISLANDS. 
Exhibited by Mr. F. Danvers Power. 
Mr. F. Danvers Power exhibited some fishing appli- 
ances from Ocean (Panoopa) and Pleasant (Naru) Is- 
lands in the Pacific. He said that Kanakas were pro- 
bably the best fishermen in the world, as the staple food 
of these islanders consisted of cocoanuts and fish. It was 
a picturesque sight to see these men in their canoes pad- 
dling along the edge of the reef after dark, catching fly- 
ing fish. A man holds a torch made of dead cocoanut 
leaves, tied together every six or nine inches, the light of 
which not only attracts the fish, but enables the fishermen 
to see them. As a torch burns low, a tie is torn off, and 
_the flame bursts out afresh. The fish are caught in a net 
with a handle about ten feet long, sometimes in the air 
and sometimes in the water. The average catch is about 
100 in an evening. When the men haye caught all the 
flying-fish they require, they fish with hooks for other 
kinds of fish. Hooks were exhibited made of mother of 
pearl, bone, and hair; a stalactite, bone and vegetable 
fibre; also wood, and of a bent wire nail. The natives 
will not use our barbed hooks, as they say they catch in 
rocks, ete., too easily. Sharks are attracted by a shark- 
bell, made of large cowrie shells threaded into strings, 
which, when shaken together in the water, not only make 
a noise, but flash. When a shark comes to investigate, a 
Jarge wooden hook, baited with a flying fish, is thrown 
overboard, while the other end of a stout coir rope, to 
which it is attached, is looped over a horn at the stern of 
the canoe. When the shark is hooked it is hauled up 
alongside and clubbed to death. When the weather: is 
stormy the natives are unable to fish in the ocean, so they 
breed fish in an inland lake. The fry are caught on the 
reef when the tide is out by men who paddle in the water 
armed with a wand and a kind of flat sieve, made out 
of the spathe from a cocoanut tree stretched on a wooden 
framework. The wand is used to drive the young fish up 
to the surface, when it is dropped, and the sieve is 
plunged underneath them. Those that are retained on 
the sieve are scraped up with a cocoanut shell and placed 
in a conch shell of water, in which they are conveyed to 
the lake. The lake is divided into paddocks by cocoanut 
leaves piled one on the top of the other, to form a wall; 
each paddock belongs to a family, and in rough weather 
