It seems impossible to fix with certainty the period at which fishing with a running line made its first appearance. No early data exist, nor do the few early pictures of mediæval rods indicate the presence of a wire top ring. I had a lively hope, when I recalled its many plates and figures, of extracting some guidance from the most important French work of early date (1660) dealing with fishing, _Les Ruses Innocentes_, which may be described (_mutatis mutandis_) as the counterpart of _The Boke of St. Albans_. The first four books are concerned with “divers methods” (of most of which the author, _à la_ Barker, claims the invention) for the making and the using of all kinds of nets for the capture of birds, both of passage and indigenous, and of many kinds of animals. The fifth confides to us “les plus beaux secrets de la pêche dans les Rivières ou dans les Etangs.” As the secrets are concerned almost entirely with Net fishing, little light reaches us. Both the instructions and illustrations in chap. xxvi., _Invention pour prendre les Brochets à la ligne volante_, show that the line after being attached about the middle of the pole was twisted round and round till made fast at the end of the pole, from which depended some eighteen feet of line.[8] Setting conjecture aside and faced by the fact that the Egyptian line was certainly made fast at the top and that neither illustrations nor writings (so far as I have been able to discover) indicate any other condition, we are driven by a mass of evidence, negative though it be, to the conclusion that the ancients[9] and the moderns down to some date between 1496 and 1651 fished with “tight” lines. [Illustration: POSEIDON, HERACLES, AND HERMES FISHING. Figured from a _lethykos_ (_c._ 550 B.C.) in the Hope Collection (Sale Cat. No. 22). See note 2, p. 10.] These were either fastened to the Rod whip-fashion, or possibly looped to it. The distinction is only important in so far as a horse-hair loop at the end of the Rod may have developed into a top ring of wire, which must not be confused with rings fixed _along_ the Rod, which R. Howlett, in _The Angler’s Sure Guide_, 1706, seems the first to note. Why the Greeks or Romans should not have emancipated themselves from the _tight_ line of Egypt and evolved the _running_ line by the mere force of their inventive genius causes much astonishment. This grows acute when we remember that they knew a fish whose properties and predatory endowments furnished an ideal example of the advantages of the _running_ line.