With the hook also we are confronted with a similar slowness of development. This is so well attested that we need more than even the authority of Butcher and Lang to establish what their slip in translating γναμπτὰ ἂγκιστρα as _bent hooks_ in _Odyssey_ IV., 369, and as _barbed hooks_ in _Odyssey_ XII., 332, would suggest, viz. a synonymous form of a synchronous invention. Since it is impossible to fix the length of time, if any, which separates the New Stone from the Copper Age, we can make no adequate guess as to how many generations of men and how many centuries of time were needed to transform the bent into the barbed hook. Perhaps Æneolithic experts can. Extant examples from Egypt of both furnish, however, some chronological data. If the argument from silence, or rather from non-survival in one particular country, be not pressed unduly, these tend to prove that so far from their being twin brethren, the birth of the bent anteceded that of the barbed hook by at any rate the number of years which separated the Ist from the XVIIIth Dynasty, before which the occurrence of a barbed hook is rare. The first implement of fishing, be it what you please, was no split-cane Rod, nor the “town-like Net” of Oppian, but some simple device created by the insistent necessity of procuring food. With our primitive ancestors, as with the companions of Menelaus, often “was hunger gnawing at their bellies,” a hunger accentuated at one period by the retreat further into the primeval forests or at another by the actual decrease of the animals, which had hitherto furnished the staple of Man’s sustenance. Fortunately other data more ancient and more authoritative than the Egyptian or Sumerian as to priority of implement help the quest of Archæologists. Blazing their trail backwards in the half-light of non-historical forests, they hap on many a _cache_ of ancient devices in the settlements of the New Stone Man. Pausing merely to examine these, they cut their way through yet denser and darker timber, until eventually they emerge at an opening wherein once stood the ultimate if scarcely the original storehouse, whence Neolithic Man drew and in the course of long travel bettered his materials—the dwelling place of the Old Stone Man. To this storehouse we too must press, tarrying only at the _caches_ to note cursorily Neolithic betterment or invention. The dwelling place is one of many mansions, or rather of many rude caverns dotted over Europe. Of such are Kent’s Cave near Torquay (which from its remains of animals may have been a mansion, or technically a “station,” as early as any), the Kesserloch in Switzerland, the shelters, or _cavernes_, in Southern France, of which La Madelaine in Dordogne, earliest to be discovered, ranks still the most famous, and a score or so of stations in Spain—not limited we now realise to its north-west corner—of which Altamira, not far from Santander, stands out pre-eminent.