Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

DESCENT OF FISHING DEVICES 39degrees of descent would now involve !—something begat theRod.From this genealogical table I venture to dissent. Iclaim that the hunting Spear, Protean in possibilities, waseither itself the Rod, or was, if " matre pulchra filia pulchrior "do not apply, at least the direct parent of the primitive Rod.In the bigger hunting of our own sorrowful day the sameprinciple manifests itself, for the British soldier in France oftenangled with his line attached to his bayoneted rifle.Many writers have attempted, some like de Mortillet withtypical French logic, some with none, to set down the sequentialdevelopment of fishing. As the Censor has not as yet bannedfree expression of piscatorial opinions, I conclude this chapterwith essajdng a scheme of reconstruction of my own.First came fishing with the hand, la piche a la main, which,according to Abel Hovelacque, " est le mode le plus elementairect certainement le moins productif." 1 This method we maysurmise was first exercised on fish left half stranded in smallpools by the action of tides or floods, or on fish spawning in theshallow redds. 2As la peche a la main was the first to arrive, so was it thefirst to cease from the functions of parentage or of fission,for with " tickling," described by iElian as even in his day anancient device, further evolution of this method practicallyended. 3Second came the hunting Spear, used originally on fishlying in pools,small of size but of depth sufficient to prevent^ Les Debuts de I'humaniU, etc. (Paris, 1881), p. 69. E. Krause, op. cit.,p. 153, agrees.* " Apes know how to get oysters thrown up on the shore, but man hasbeen endowed with the knowledge how to get them in and out of the sea."The sentiment, if not the style, of this sentence—to prove the superior designand creation of man over the animal creation—seems not quite unworthy ofIzaak Walton's pages.2 His pleasant description of " tickling " and his " viro Britanno " mustbe my excuse for introducing a writer in Latin so late after my limit of 500 a.d.as Parthenius, better known as Giannettasi, the author of Halieutica, publishedat Naples in 1689 :" Paulatim digitis piscator moUiter alvumDefricat, et sensim palpando repit in ipsasCffiruleas branchas, subituque apprendit : et iliaBlanditiis decepta viro fit praeda Britanno."