Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/498

 that the beasts could not break through them. The large size of the meshes is denoted by the phrases "retia rara " and "raras plagas ;" and it is exhibited in a bas-relief in the collection of ancient marbles at Ince-Blundell in Lancashire. See Plate X. fig. 1. This sculpture presents the following circumstances, which are worthy of notice as illustrative of the passages above collected from ancient authors. Three servants with staves carry a large net on their shoulders. The foremost of them holds by a leash a dog, which is eager to engage in the chase. Then follows another scene in the hunt. A net with very large meshes and five feet high is set up, being supported by three stakes. Two boars and two deer are caught. A watchman, holding a staff, stands at each end of the net. Fig. 2, Plate X. is taken from a bas-relief in the same collection, representing a party returning from the chase, with the quadrupeds which they have caught. Two men carry the net, holding in their hands the stakes with forks at the top. These bas-reliefs have been taken from sarcophagi erected in commemoration of hunters, and they are engraved in the ''Ancient statues, &c. at Ince-Blundell'', vol. ii. pl. 89 and 126. An excellent representation of these forked staves is given in a sepulchral bas-relief in Bartoli, Admiranda, tab. 70, which Mr. Dansey has copied at p. 307 of his translation of Arrian on Coursing, and which represents a party of hunters returning from the chase. Another example of the varus, or forked staff, is seen in a sepulchral stone lately found at York (England), and engraved in Mr. Wellbeloved's Eburacum, pl. 14. fig. 2. The man, who holds the varus in his right hand, and who appears to be a huntsman and a native of the north of England, though partly clothed after the Roman fashion, wears an inner and outer tunic, and over them a fringed sagum. In the ''Sepolcri de' Nasoni'', published by Bartoli, there is a representation of a lion-hunt, and of another in which deer are caught by means of nets set up so as to inclose a large space. In Mont-*