“Elle extend ses filets, elle invente de nouveaux moyens de succès, elle s’attache un plus grand nombre d’hommes. Elle pénètre dans les profondeurs des abîmes, elle arrache aux angles les plus secrets, elle poursuit jusqu’aux extrémités du globe les objets de sa constante recherche.”—G. E. Lacèpéde, Hist. Nat. des poissons.
“What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed, when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all Conjecture.”—Sir Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall.
The craft of Fishing possesses an ancestry so ancient, or according to a Polynesian legend so literally abysmal, that for those who have their business on the waters, deep or shallow, it is but seemly, it is certainly of interest, to essay the tracing of its pedigree, and the linking of the generations of its far-flung lineage.
What were, and whence came its first forbears, and of what manner and of what matter were the original parents of its devices are questions which should appeal to the large majority of its followers. The sansculottes, however stalwart, who does not in his heart of hearts rejoice in owning, or claiming, some genealogical garments, wherein to hide his nakedness, is rare and abnormal.
The pedigree is like and unlike its celebrated Urquhart brother. Like in the gaps in generations, which in his endeavour directly to deduce his family from Adam even Sir Thomas’s ingenuity failed to bridge, despite the prolongation when necessary of the lives of his ancestors to ten times the allotted span. Unlike in antiquity, since it stretches far, very far beyond “Deucalion’s Floud” and Adam’s Paradise.
Angling, despite wide ramifications, has perhaps stamped its stock more vividly and has bred truer to original type than its elder brother Hunting. The variance of a repeating rifle from what some hold to be their common first sire, a sharpened pole, is larger and more marked than that of our most up-to-date Rod.
The riddle, as in other cases of disputed succession, of identifying the first real head of the family or the earliest begetter of the race is rendered more complex by wide geographical dispersion. It is possibly insoluble.
Nevertheless to this labour of love I now address myself.
The question of priority of the implement used for catching fish has been often moot, sometimes acute, for, in Walton’s words, “former times have had their Disquisitions about it.”