Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/512

 viii. 12. § 1; and by Pliny, H. N. xvi. 8. s. 13, where, in reciting the various uses of cork, he says it was employed "piscantium tragulis." Sidonius Apollinaris, describing his own villa, says:—

Hinc jam spectabis, ut promoveat alnum piscator in pelagus, ut stataria retia suberinis corticibus extendat.—Epist. ii. 2.

"Hence you will see how the fisherman moves forward his boat into the deep water, that he may extend his stationary nets by means of corks."

Alciphron, in his account of a fishing excursion near the Promontory of Phalerum, says, "The draught of fishes was so great as almost to submerge the corks ." The earnest desire of a posterity, founded on the wish for posthumous remembrance, which was a very strong and prevailing sentiment among the ancients, is illustrated by the language of Electra in the Choëphorœ of Æschylus, where she entreats her father upon this consideration to attend to her prayer, and likens his memory to a net, which his children, like corks, would save from disappearing:—"Do not extinguish the race of the Pelopidæ. For thus you will live after you are dead. For a man's children are the preservers of his fame when dead, and, like corks in dragging the net, they save the flaxen string from the abyss." The use of the corks is mentioned in several of the epigrams of the Greek Anthology, already referred to, and in the following passage of Plutarch:—

[Greek: Ôsper tous ta diktya diasêmainontas en tê thalassê phellous orômen epipheromenous.]—De Genio Socratis, p. 1050, ed Steph.

Passages have been already produced from Plutarch, Artemidorus, and the Alexandrine version of Isaiah and Habakkuk, in which the sean is mentioned by its Greek name [Greek: sagênê], in contradistinction to other kinds of nets. Also the passage above cited from Virgil's Georgics ("pelagoque alius trahit humida lina"), indicates the use of the sean in deep water, and the practice of dragging it out of the water by means of ropes, which gave origin both to its English name, the Drag-net, and to its Latin appellations, tragula, used by Pliny (l. c.),—Epist. i. 1.]