Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/504

 Lydians had no sooner been brought into subjection by the Persians than the Ionians and Æolians sent ambassadors to Cyrus at Sardis, entreating him to receive them under his dominion on the same conditions on which they had been under Crœsus. To this proposal he replied in the following fable. A piper, having seen some fishes in the sea, ''played for a while on his pipe, thinking that this would make them come to him on the land''. Perceiving the fallacy of this expectation, he took a casting-net, and, having thrown it around a great number of the fishes, he drew them out of the water. He then said to the fishes, as they were jumping about, ''As you did not choose to dance out of the water, when I played to you on my pipe, you may put a stop to your dancing now''." The other passage (ii. 95) has been illustrated in a very successful manner by William Spence, Esq., F. R. S., in a paper in the Transactions of the Entomological Society for the year 1834. In connection with the curious fact, that the common house-fly will not in general pass through the meshes of a net, Mr. Spence produces this passage, in which Herodotus states, that the fishermen who lived about the marshes of Egypt, being each in possession of a casting-net, and using it in the day-*time to catch fishes, employed these nets in the night to keep off the gnats, by which that country is infested. The casting-net was fixed so as to encircle the bed, on which the fisherman slept; and, as this kind of net is always pear-shaped, or of a conical form, it is evident that nothing could be better adapted to the purpose, as it would be suspended like a tent over the body of its owner. In this passage Herodotus twice uses the term [Greek: amphiblêstron], and once he calls the same thing [Greek: diktyon], because, as we have seen, this was a common term applicable to nets of every description.

The antiquity of the casting-net among the Greeks appearsthus: "Verriculum, Rete quod circumjicitur." Rete, however, corresponds to [Greek: diktyon], which meant a net of any kind; and Verriculum is the Latin for [Greek: Sagênê], which, as will be shown hereafter, was a sean, or drag-net.]