(3) By degrees, also, the relations of colonial churches to the archbishop of Canterbury have changed. Until 1855 no colonial bishop was consecrated outside the British Isles, the first instance being Dr. MacDougall of Labuan, consecrated in India under a commission from the archbishop of Canterbury; and until 1874 it was held to be unlawful for a bishop to be consecrated in England without taking the suffragan's oath of due obedience. This necessity was removed by the Colonial Clergy Act of 1874, which permits the archbishop at his discretion to dispense with the oath. This, however, has not been done in all cases; and as late as 1890 it was taken by the metropolitan of Sydney at his consecration. Thus the constituent parts of the Anglican communion gradually acquire autonomy: missionary jurisdictions develop into organized dioceses, and dioceses are grouped into provinces with canons of their own. But the most complete autonomy does not involve isolation. The churches are in full communion with one another, and act together in many ways; missionary jurisdictions and dioceses are mapped out by common arrangement, and even transferred if it seems advisable; e.g. the diocese Honolulu (Hawaii), previously under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Canterbury, was transferred in 1900 to the Episcopal Church in the United States on account of political changes. Though the see of Canterbury claims no primacy over the Anglican communion analogous to that exercised over the Roman Church by the popes, it is regarded with a strong affection and deference, which shows itself by frequent consultation and interchange of greetings. There is also a strong common life emphasized by common action.
Pan-Anglican Congress.
The conference of Anglican bishops from all parts of the world, instituted by Archbishop Longley in 1867, and known as the Lambeth Conferences (q.v.), though even for the Anglican communion they have not the authority of an ecumenical synod, and their decisions are rather of the nature of counsels than commands, have done much to promote the harmony and co-operation of the various branches of the Church. An even more imposing manifestation of this common life was given by the great pan-Anglican congress held in London between the 12th and 24th of June 1908, which preceded the Lambeth conference opened on the 5th of July. The idea of this originated with Bishop Montgomery, secretary to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and was endorsed by a resolution of the United Boards of Mission in 1903. As the result of negotiations and preparations extending over five years, 250 bishops, together with delegates, clerical and lay, from every diocese in the Anglican communion, met in London, the opening service of intercession being held in Westminster Abbey. In its general character, the meeting was but a Church congress on an enlarged scale, and the subjects discussed, e.g.. the attitude of churchmen towards the question of the marriage laws or that of socialism, followed much the same lines. The congress, of course, had no power to decide or to legislate for the Church, its main value being in drawing its scattered members closer together, in bringing the newer and more isolated branches into consciousness of their contact with the parent stem, and in opening the eyes of the Church of England to the point of view and the peculiar problems of the daughter-churches.
The Anglican communion consists of the following:—(1) The Church of England, 2 provinces, Canterbury and York, with 24 and 11 dioceses respectively. (2) The Church of Ireland, 2 provinces, Armagh and Dublin, with 7 and 6 dioceses respectively. (3) The Scottish Episcopal Church, with 7 dioceses. (4) The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, with 89 dioceses and missionary jurisdictions, including North Tokyo, Kyoto, Shanghai, Cape Palmas, and the independent dioceses of Hayti and Brazil. (5) The Canadian Church, consisting of (a) the province of Canada, with 10 dioceses; (b) the province of Rupert's Land, with 8 dioceses. (6) The Church in India and Ceylon, 1 province of 11 dioceses. (7) The Church of the West Indies, 1 province of 8 dioceses, of which Barbados and the Windward Islands are at present united. (8) The Australian Church, consisting of (a) the province of New South Wales, with 10 dioceses; (b) the province of Queensland, with 5 dioceses; (c) the province of Victoria, with 5 dioceses. (9) The Church of New Zealand, 1 province of 7 dioceses, together with the missionary jurisdiction of Melanesia. (10) The South African Church, 1 province of 10 dioceses, with the 2 missionary jurisdictions of Masbonaland and Lebombo. (11) Nearly 30 isolated dioceses and missionary jurisdictions holding mission from the see of Canterbury.
AUTHORITIES.—Official Year-book of the Church of England; Phillimore, Ecclesiastical Law, vol. ii. (London, 1895); Digest of S. P. G. Records (London, 1893); E. Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, 3 vols. (London, 1899); H. W. Tucker, The English Church in Other Lands (London, 1886); A. T. Wirgman, The Church and the Civil Power (London, 1893).
ANGLING, the art or practice of the sport of catching fish by means of a baited hook or "angle" (from the Indo-European root ank-, meaning "bend").[[1]] It is among the most ancient of human activities, and may be said to date from the time when man was in the infancy of the Stone Age, eking out a precarious existence by the slaughter of any living thing which he could reach with the rude weapons at his command. It is probable that attack on fishes was at first much the same as attack on animals, a matter of force rather than of guile, and conducted by means of a rude spear with a flint head. It is probable, too, that the primitive harpooners were not signally successful in their efforts, and so set their wits to work to devise other means of getting at the abundant food which waited for them in every piece of water near their caves. Observation would soon show them that fish fed greedily on each other and on other inhabitants of the water or living things that fell into it, and so, no doubt, arose the idea of entangling the prey by means of its appetite. Hence came the notion of the first hook, which, it seems certain, was not a hook at all but a "gorge," a piece of flint or stone which the fish could swallow with the bait but which it could not eject afterwards. From remains found in cave-dwellings and their neighbourhood in different parts of the world it is obvious that these gorges varied in shape, but in general the idea was the same, a narrow strip of stone or flake of flint, either straight or slightly curved at the ends, with a groove in the middle round which the line could be fastened. Buried in the bait it would be swallowed end first; then the tightening of the line would fix it cross-wise in the quarry's, stomach or gullet and so the capture would be assured. The device still lingers in France and in a few remote parts of England in the method of catching eels which is known as "sniggling." In this a needle buried in a worm plays the part of the prehistoric gorge.
The evolution of the fish-hook from the slightly curved gorge is easily intelligible. The ends became more and more curved, until eventually an object not unlike a double hook was attained. This development would be materially assisted by man's discovery of the uses of bronze and its adaptability to his requirements. The single hook, of the pattern more or less familiar to us, was possibly a concession of the lake-dweller to what may even then have been a problem—the "education" of fish, and to a recognition of the fact that sport with the crude old methods was falling off. But it is also not improbable that in some parts of the world the single hook developed pari passu with the double, and that, on the sea-shore for instance, where man was able to employ so adaptable a substance as shell, the first hook was a curved fragment of shell lashed with fibre to a piece of wood or bone, in such a way that the shell formed the bend of the hook while the wood or bone formed the shank. Both early remains and recent hooks from the Fiji Islands bear out this supposition. It is also likely that flint, horn and bone were pressed into service in a similar manner. The nature of the line or the rod that may have been used with these early hooks is largely a matter of conjecture. The first line was perhaps the tendril of a plant, the first rod possibly a sapling tree. But it is fairly obvious that the rod must have been suggested by the necessity of getting the bait out over obstacles which lay between the fisherman and the water, and that it was a device for increasing both the reach of the arm and the length of the line. It seems not improbable that the rod very early formed a part of the fisherman's equipment.
Literary History.—From prehistoric times down to comparatively late in the days of chronicles, angling appears to have remained a practice; its development into an art or sport is a modern idea. In the earliest literature references to angling are not very numerous, but there are passages in the Old Testament which show that fish-taking with hook as well as net was one of the common industries in the East, and that fish, where it was obtainable, formed an important article of diet. In Numbers (xi. 5) the children of Israel mourn for the fish which they "did eat in Egypt freely." So much too is proved by the monuments of Egypt; indeed more, for the figures found in some of the Egyptian fishing pictures using short rods and stout lines are sometimes attired after the manner of those who were great in the land. This indicates that angling had already, in a highly civilized country, taken its place among the methods of diversion at the disposal of the wealthy, though from the uncompromising nature of the tackle depicted and the apparent simplicity of the fish it would scarcely be safe to assume that in Egypt angling arrived at the dignity of becoming an "art." In Europe it took very much longer for the taking of fish to be regarded even as an amusement, and the earliest references to it in the Greek and Latin classics are not very satisfying to the sportsman. There is, however, a passage in the Odyssey (xii. 247) which is of considerable importance, as it shows that fishing with rod and line was well enough understood in early Greece to be used as a popular illustration. It occurs in the well-known scene where Scylla seizes the companions of Odysseus out of the ship and bears them upwards, just as "some fisher on a headland with a long rod" brings small fishes gasping to the shore. Another important, though comparatively late, passage in Greek poetry is the twenty-first idyll of Theocritus. In this the fisherman Asphalion relates how in a dream he hooked a large golden fish and describes graphically, albeit with some obscurity of language, how he "played" it. Asphalion used a rod and fished from a rock, much after the manner of the Homeric angler. Among other Greek writers, Herodotus has a good many references to fish and fishing; the capture of fish is once or twice mentioned or implied by Plato, notably in the Laws (vii. 823); Aristotle deals with fishes in his Natural History, and there are one or two fishing passages in the anthology. But in Greek literature, as a whole the subject of angling is not at all prominent. In writers of late Greek, however, there is more material. Plutarch, for instance, gives us the famous story of the fishing match between Antony and Cleopatra, which has been utilized by Shakespeare. Moreover, it is in Greek that the first complete treatise on fishing which has come down to us is written, the Halieutica of Oppian (c. A.D. 169). It is a hexameter poem in five books with perhaps more technical than sporting interest, and not so much even of that as the length of the work would suggest. Still it contains some information about tackle and methods, and some passages describing battles with big fish, in the right spirit of enthusiasm. Also in Greek is what is famous as the first reference in literature to fly-fishing, in the fifteenth book of Aelian's Natural History (3rd century A.D.). It is there described how the Macedonians captured a certain spotted fish in the river Astraeus by means of a lure composed of coloured wool and feathers, which was presumably used in the manner now known as "dapping." That there were other Greek writers who dealt with fish and fishing and composed "halieutics" we know from Athenaeus. In the first book of his Deipnosophistae he gives a list of them. But he compares their work unfavourably with the passage of Homer already cited, in a way which suggests that their knowledge of angling was not a great advance upon the knowledge of their remote literary ancestors. In Latin literature allusions to angling are rather more numerous than in Greek, but on the whole they are unimportant. Part of a poem by Ovid, the Halieuticon, composed during the poet's exile at Tomi after A.D. 9, still survives. In other Roman writers the subject is only treated by way of allusion or illustration. Martial, however, provides, among other passages, what may perhaps be entitled to rank as the earliest notice of private fishery rights—the epigram Ad Piscatorem, which warns would-be poachers from casting a line in the Baian lake. Pliny the elder devoted the ninth book of his Natural History to fishes and water-life, and Plautus, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Pliny the younger and Suetonius all allude to angling here and there. Agricultural writers, too, such as Varro and Columella, deal with the subject of fish ponds and stews rather fully. Later than any of these, but still just included in Latin literature, we have Ausonius (c. A.D. 320) and his well-known idyll the Mosella, which contains a good deal about the fish of the Moselle and the methods of catching them. In this poem is to be found the first recognizable description of members of the salmon family, and, though the manner of their application is rather doubtful, the names salmo, salar and fario strike a responsive note in the breast of the modern angler.
Post-classical Literature.—As to what happened in the world of angling in the first few centuries of the Christian era we know little. It may be inferred, however, that both fish and fishermen occupied a more honourable position in Christendom than they ever did before. The prominence of fishermen in the gospel narratives would in itself have been enough to bring this about, but it also happened that the Greek word for fish, ΙΧΘΥΣ, had an anagrammatic significance which the devout were not slow to perceive. The initials of the word resolve into what is practically a confession of faith, Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). It is therefore not surprising that we find the fish very prominent as a sacred emblem in the painting and sculpture of the primitive church, or that Clement of Alexandria should have recommended it, among other things, as a device for signet rings or seals. The fisherman too is frequently represented in early Christian art, and it is worthy of remark that he more often uses a line and hook than a net. The references to fish and fishing scattered about in the writings of the early fathers for the most part reflect the two ideas of the sacredness of the fish and divine authorization of the fisherman; the second idea certainly prevailed until the time of Izaak Walton, for he uses it to justify his pastime. It is also not unlikely that the practice of fasting (in many cases fish was allowed when meat was forbidden) gave the art of catching fish additional importance. It seems at any rate to have been a consideration of weight when sites were chosen for monasteries in Europe, and in many cases when no fish-producing river was at hand the lack was supplied by the construction of fish-ponds. Despite all this, however, save for an occasional allusion in the early fathers, there is hardly a connecting link between the literature of Pagan Rome and the literature that sprang up on the invention of printing. One volume, the Geoponica, a Greek compilation concerning whose authorship and date there has been much dispute, is attributed in Bibliotheca Piscatoria to the beginning of the 10th century. It contains one book on fish, fish-ponds and fishing, with prescriptions for baits, &c., extracted for the most part from other writers. But it seems doubtful whether its date should not be placed very much earlier. Tradition makes it a Carthaginian treatise translated into Greek. A more satisfactory fragment of fishing literature is to be found in the Colloquy of Ælfric, written (ad pucros linguae latinae locutionis exercendos) towards the end of the same century. Ælfric became archbishop of Canterbury in A.D. 995, and the passage in the Anglo-Saxon text-book takes honourable rank as the earliest reference to fishing in English writings, though it is not of any great length. It is to be noted that the fisher who takes a share in the colloquy states that he prefers fishing in the river to fishing in the sea. Ascribed to the 13th or 14th century is a Latin poem De Vetula, whose author was apparently Richard de Fournival. It contains a passage on angling, and was placed to the credit of Ovid when first printed (c. 1470). A manuscript in the British museum, Comptes des pêcheries de l'église de Troyes (A.D. 1349-1413), gives a minute account of the fisheries with the weights of fish captured and the expenses of working. There is, however, practically nothing else of importance till we come to the first printed book on angling (a translation of Oppian, 1478, excepted), and so to the beginning of the literature proper. This first book was a little volume printed in Antwerp probably in 1492 at the press of Matthias van der Goes. In size it is little more than a pamphlet, and it treats of birds as well as fish:—Dit Boecxken leert hoe men mach Voghelen ... ende ... visschen vangen metten kanden. Ende oeck andersins.... ("This book teaches how one may catch birds ... and ... fish with the hands, and also otherwise"). Only one copy apparently survives, in the Denison library, and a translation privately printed for Mr. Alfred Denison in 1872 was limited to twenty-five copies. At least two other editions of the book appeared in Flemish, and it also made its way, in 1502, to Germany, where, translated and with certain alterations and additions, it seems to have been re-issued frequently. Next in date comes the famous Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, printed at Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 as a part of the second edition of The Book of St. Albans. The treatise is for this reason associated with the name of Dame Juliana Berners, but that somewhat dubious compiler can have had nothing whatever to do with it. The treatise is almost certainly a compilation from some earlier work on angling ("bokes of credence" are mentioned in its text), possibly from a manuscript of the earlier part of the 15th century, of which a portion is preserved in the Denison collection. This was published in 1883 by Mr. Thomas Satchell under the title An Older Form of the Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle. But it is also possible that a still older work was the parent of both books, for it has been held that the manuscript is an independent version. However this may be, it is certain that the treatise itself has been the parent of many other works. Many of the instructions contained in it are handed down from generation to generation with little change except in diction. Especially is this the case with the list of trout-flies, a meagre twelve, which survives in many fishing books until well into the 18th century.
From the beginning of the 16th century the fisherman's library begins to grow apace, as, though books solely devoted to fishing are not yet frequent, works on husbandry and country pursuits almost all contain something on the subject. In Italy the fisherman and his occupation apparently were considered poetically; the word pescatore or its cognates are common on Italian 16th and 17th century title-pages, though in many instances the fulfilment of the implied promise is not adequate, from an angler's point of view. From the pages of Bibliotheca Piscatoria a fairly long list of Italian writers could be gleaned. Among them may be mentioned Sannazaro (Piscatoria, &c., Rome, 1526) and Andrea Calmo (Rime pescatorie, Venice, 1557). A century later was Parthenius, who published a volume of Halieutica at Naples. This writer has an amusing reference to the art of "tickling" trout as practised in Britain. In Germany, as has been shown, the original little Flemish treatise had a wide vogue in the 16th century, and fishing played a part in a good many books on husbandry such as that of Conrad Heresbach (1570). Fish and fish-ponds formed the main topic of a Latin work by Dubravius (1552), while Gesner in the middle of the 16th and Aldrovandi at the beginning of the 17th centuries wrote at length on the natural history of fishes. In France the subject is less well represented, but Les Pescheries of Chris. de Gamon (Lyons, 1599) and Le Plaisir des champs of Cl. Gauchet (Paris, 1604) deserve to be noted. Les Ruses innocentes by François Fortin, first published at Paris in 1600, and several times in later editions, is characterized by Messrs Westwood and Satchell as "on the whole the most interesting contribution made by France to the literature of angling." England during the most part of the 16th century was evidently well enough served by the original treatise out of The Book of St. Albans. It was republished twice by Wynkyn de Worde, six or seven times by Copland, and some five times by other printers. It was also practically republished in A Booke of Fishing by L. M. (1590). L. M. (Leonard Mascall) ranks as an angling author, but he did little more than borrow and edit the treatise. The same may be said of another version of The Book of St. Albans "now newly collected by W. G. Faulkener" and issued in 1596.