[80] The Life of the Salmon, p. xv, London, 1907: “At once the most primitive and most deadly method of catching fish, which inhabit rivers, is the erection of built barriers and enclosures.” Plutarch (De Sol. Anim. 26) has no doubt of the priority of the Line over the Net: “Fishermen when perceiving that most of the fishes scorned the line and hook as stale devices or such as can be discovered, betook themselves to fine force and shut them up with great casting nets, like as the Persians serve their enemies in their wars”—σαγηνεύειν—(Cf. Herodotus, vi. 31) “to sweep the whole population off the face of a country” (Hollands’ Trs.). W. v. Schulenburg, Märkische Fischerei (Berlin, 1903), s. 62, “Das Fischnetz galt also schon in der Vorgeschichtlichen Zeit, im grauen Altertum für uralt. Mit Recht darf der Fischer sich den ältesten Gewerben der Menschheit zuzählen.”
[81] Cf. A. E. Pratt, Two Years among the New Guinea Cannibals (London, 1906), p. 266, and 3 photographs. The webs spun by the spiders in the forests are six feet in diameter, with meshes varying from one inch at the outside to about one-eighth at the centre. The diligence of the creatures has been pressed into weaving fishing-nets for the use of man by setting up, where the webs are thickest, long bamboos bent over in a loop at the end. On this most convenient frame the spider in a short time produces a web which resists water as readily as does a duck’s back, and holds fish up to a pound satisfactorily. See also Robert W. Williamson (The Maflu Mountain People of British New Guinea (London, 1912), p. 193) who differs materially from Pratt as to the formation of the net. The illustration is reproduced by the kind permission of The Illustrated London News Co.
[82] Jowett’s Translation, vol. iv. p. 343. The whole passage, which is too long for quotation, is fairly typical of Platonic methods.
[83] The italics are mine.
[84] 23 Law Times, 439.
[85] In H. Grassmann’s Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda, twice. One cannot indict a whole sex for inebriety on the strength of a single passage, but fish, despite matsya being masculine in Sanskrit, are always feminine according to the Avesta (vol. v. p. 61, of Sacred Books of the East, Pahlavi Texts): “Water, Earth, Plants, and Fish are female, and never otherwise.”
[86] For help and guidance as to India I am greatly in debt to my old Oxford friend, Dr. A. Macdonell, Boden Professor of Sanskrit, and to his two books, History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 143, and Macdonell and Keith, Vedic Index of Names and Subjects (London, 1912), vol. ii. p. 173.
[87] The Story of the Flood in the Catapatha Brāhmana.
[88] Sacred Books of the East, xx. 252. Cf. x. 41.
[89] Ibid., xvi. 7. Cf. xxiii. 239, and v. 65.