This gold hook must not be confounded with the silver hook not infrequently employed in the remoter districts of Great Britain by certain anglers, who in their anxiety to avoid being greeted with Martial’s “ecce redit sporta piscator inani,” cross with silver the palm of more fortunate brethren, and
“Take with high erected comb The fish, or else the story, home And cook it.”
[63] See R. Munro’s Lake Dwellings of Europe, pp. 127, 499, 509. Flinders Petrie, Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 f., has a section on fish-hooks with good illustrations, pl. 44, figs. 61-87, pl. 43, figs. 59, 60, 88-102. “Considering how much the Lake-dwellers relied upon fishing, the moderate number of hooks found points to their depending more on nets. The few copied here, 88-94, are merely rounded, without any peculiar form.”
[64] Many of the Solutréan tanged blades and pointes à cran are small enough to suggest their use as arrowheads, and Rutot has described tanged and barbed “arrowheads” from Palæolithic deposits in Belgium.
[65] Op. cit., p. 160. But why? Flint points break quicker than wood.
[66] See Julie Schlemm, Wörterbuch zur Vorgeschichte (Berlin, 1908), pp. 555-7. The immediate successors of the single spear were probably the bident and trident. Owing to the refraction of light and other reasons a spear is difficult of accurate direction, but the broader surface of the trident helps to lessen the factor of error.
[67] H. J. Osborne (op. cit., p. 385 ff.) states that, with the exception of one half-finished hole in a Harpoon from La Madelaine, the side hole for the attachment of the thong to the Harpoon does not appear in the French Magdalenian Harpoon, although in those from Cantabria it is nearly always present. The Azilian weapon usually bears a hole.
[68] The Troglodytes of the Vézère Valley, Smithsonian Report, 1872, p. 95.
[69] In Contributions to North American Ethnology, 1877, i. p. 43, Dall states that the débris of the heaps show tolerably uniform division into three stages, characterised by the food which formed the staple of subsistence and by the weapons for obtaining as well as the utensils for preparing the food. The stages are: 1st, The Littoral period, represented by the Echinus layer; 2nd, The Fishing period, represented by the Fish-bone layer; 3rd, The Hunting period, represented by the Mammalian layer. This antecedence of fishing before hunting, if Dall be correct, was, I imagine, caused probably by local or climatic conditions in the Arctic Circle; it is not the general rule elsewhere.
[70] Les Débuts de l’humanité, etc. (Paris, 1881), p. 69. E. Krause, op. cit., p. 153, agrees.