[69] In _Contributions to North American Ethnology_, 1877, i. p. 43, Dall states that the _débris_ of the heaps show tolerably uniform division into three stages, characterised by the food which formed the staple of subsistence and by the weapons for obtaining as well as the utensils for preparing the food. The stages are: 1st, The Littoral period, represented by the _Echinus_ layer; 2nd, The Fishing period, represented by the Fish-bone layer; 3rd, The Hunting period, represented by the Mammalian layer. This antecedence of fishing before hunting, if Dall be correct, was, I imagine, caused probably by local or climatic conditions in the Arctic Circle; it is not the general rule elsewhere. [70] _Les Débuts de l’humanité_, etc. (Paris, 1881), p. 69. E. Krause, _op. cit._, p. 153, agrees. [71] “Apes know how to get oysters thrown up on the shore, but man has been endowed with the knowledge how to get them in and out of the sea.” The sentiment, if not the style, of this sentence—to prove the superior design and creation of man over the animal creation—seems not quite unworthy of Izaak Walton’s pages. [72] His pleasant description of “tickling” and his “viro Britanno” must be my excuse for introducing a writer in Latin so late after my limit of 500 A.D. as Parthenius, better known as Giannettasi, the author of _Halieutica_, published at Naples in 1689: “Paulatim digitis piscator molliter alvum Defricat, et sensim palpando repit in ipsas Cæruleas branchas, subituque apprendit: et illa Blanditiis decepta viro fit præda Britanno.” [73] For a similar use of bow and harpoon arrow by the Bororo tribes in the Amazon valley, see W. A. Cork, _Through the Wilderness of Brazil_, p. 380. Our gaff, a descendant, possibly, of the unilaterally one-barbed spear, seems possessed of perpetual youth. The first description of its use in Angling in England occurs, according to Mr. Marston (_Walton and the Earlier Fishing Writers_ (1898), p. 97), in T. Barker’s _Art of Angling_ (1651), but according to Dr. Turrell, _op. cit._, pp. 85 and 91, only in Barker’s 2nd of 1657, “a good large landing hook.” From the definition, however, by Blount, _Glossage_, in 1657, “_Gaffe_, an iron wherewith seamen pull great Fishes into their ships,” its previous existence and employment at sea can be deduced. [74] There is no hook; only a piece of whalebone or a stem of seaweed, with a feather stuck at the end, attached to which is a running knot, which holds the bait. As soon as the fish has swallowed feather and bait, the women, for the men disdain fishing, draw it to the surface and quickly seize it. Cf. Darwin, _Jour. of Researches, etc., during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle_ (London, 1860), ch. x, p. 213.