[Footnote 1:  As to whether “angling” necessarily implies a rod as well as a line and hook, see the discussion in the law case of Barnard v. Roberts (Times L.R., April 13, 1907), when the question arose as to the use of night-lines being angling; but the decision against night-lines went on the ground of the absence of the personal element rather than on the absence of a rod.  The various dictionaries are blind guides on this point, and the authorities cited are inconclusive; but, broadly speaking, angling now implies three necessary factors—­a personal angler, the sporting element, and the use of recognized fishing-tackle.]

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.

[v.02 p.0022]

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