Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/339

] To fish for these from a canoe a very long and light line is required; in Santa Cruz and the Solomon Islands a float is used, a short stick, or wooden shaft shaped like a bird atop, weighted with a stone, a contrivance which must also be known in the Banks' Islands, since it has a name, wo-uto, there. The stitch in netting is that familiar in Europe, and nets are made extremely fine, and very large and strong. In the Solomon Islands no mesh is used for a very large net, but for a pig-net the loop is measured by the knee, for a turtle-net by a man's shoulders. Nets, sometimes fifty feet square, are used as seines, and are let down between stages in shoaling water; they are cast by the hand, or sunk by the side of a canoe. An ingenious contrivance is where a square net has its four corners kept apart by two diagonal elastic rods, at the intersection of which the line by which it is lowered is attached; when