Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

SARGUS FISHING IN SHE-GOAT'S SKIN 241we have rendered more serviceable and better adapted to therequirements of fish more harried, and consequently morehighly educated.The old devices, the old recipes were never entirely lost.iThey continued to be handed down through the Middle Ages,and may be found in most of the collections of householdrecipes, such as those of Baptista Porta, Conrad Heresbach,and others. They naturally in the course of sor^e thousandyears got rather split up, or fell into abeyance ; it was not, infact, till the seventeenth century that fairly full collections ofthem began to reappear.But except just to mention " tickhng," an ancient devicein both Oppian and ^lian, we have room here only for fourmethods, all very quaint, either unknown or uncommon amongtwentieth-century fishers.The first, that by which the goat-herd annexes the Sargus,according to Oppian. 2In hot weather it was, and still is,in Sicily the wont of thegoat-herds to drive their flocks to some cool shallow of the sea." Once upon a time " one of them noticed that the sargi cameThe reason for this—whetherround the goats in vast shoals.grasped in a moment by one great brain, or evolved by two orthree generations of speculating herdsmen—was discoveredto be the attraction of the male sargus by the smell of the femalegoat.So the reasoning goat-herd slays his nanny, puts himselfinside her skin, and to perfect, I presume, the resemblance ofthe deception, " adjusts on his brows the horns "! Then hegently glides into the shallow, " scatters the food full shower "among the sargi hot on their amorous mission and, well ! forthe number that were slain by " The Sturdy Rod his latentHand extends " I refer you to the fourth book of theHalieutica !Ichthyologists declare that the male sargus is very uxorious,and has at least one hundred wives always in close-herdedattendance on him. As the words " unhappy lovers " indicate^ Cf. Apostolides, op. cit., p. 31.2 Bk. IV. 308 flf. Cf. iEUan, I. 23.