300
FISH-HOOKS OF WOOD USED ON
THE ESSEX COAST.
By EDWARD LOVETT.
[Read May 21st, 1898.]
OF all the appliances used by man, perhaps none have
undergone so little change or modification as the Hook
used for catching fish, and yet it possesses an enormous
antiquity, and may possibly have even preceded the use of
weapons of the chase.
The earliest hooks, of which we have a reliable record, are
the Bronze-age hooks of the Swiss Lake Dwellings, but in all
probability, fishing-hooks and gorges existed during the Stone-
age, and the enormous number of worked flints in our museums
labelled "Awls," and " use unknown "seems to point to this.
If these flint points are lashed to a wood or bone shank, in the
manner in vogue in the South Pacific Islands, a very useful fish-
hook is made. When we bear in mind that all, or nearly all,
the settlements of man of the Stone-age were near water, we
may safely conjecture that, besides the reason for being near to
water for drinking purposes, he was in all probability a fisher-
man, for it is in such localities that I have found these flint flakes
to occur.
The investigations of the Swiss Lake Dwelling deposits
have brought to light fish-hooks of bone and teeth, and also the
first typical barbed fish-hook we know of; it was made from
a squared bar of bronze. In form it is the fish-hook of the
present day, though, of course, Allcock's fine steel hooks are a
vast improvement upon it in point of finish. When, however,
we consider that this improvement represents the evolution
of some two thousands years it amounts to comparatively
little.
These bronze hooks are of many types, from the true gorge,
the bent gorge, the double simple hook, the double barbed hook
to the true barbed hook as we now know it. As regards the
hooks and gorges of our own time; we find, as we may expect
to, in localities where man has, till recently, been in the Stone-
age, fish-hooks of much more primitive type than the Bronze
hooks of 2,000 years ago. For example, we have from the vast
area of islands of the South Pacific, fish-hooks chiefly composed
of the shells of Mollusca and Turtles, varied by the occasional use