_Conjecturæ Halieuticæ_ by Raphael Eglinus consists of a long dissertation based on the strange markings of three fishes (pictured on its title-page), two caught in Scandinavia on the same day, November 21, 1587, and the third in Pomerania on May 21, 1596. These markings, supposedly chronological, provide their author with a basis for various prophecies and warnings of the evils to come in Central Europe, especially in Germany. As neither text nor type peculiarly tempt to perusal, I have not found it easy to disentangle the disasters or allot to each country its individual woe. Deductions from Daniel, the patriarch Joseph, and of course the Apocalypse enable Eglinus to establish definitely to his own satisfaction the future advent, in one or other of the Central Kingdoms, of Antichrist. Nor, again, is it easy to gather whether a time-limit is set for his appearance, or whether the prophecies apply to twentieth-century events. Alas! also, the data do not enable me with certainty from the very promising entries from Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria to single out the precise potentate who best fills the bill, or closest answers to the author’s Antichrist.[116] Space debars from one fascinating branch of my subject—the superstitions of Fishing. Their far-flung web enclosed the ancient _piscator_ more firmly than his brother _venator_, or, indeed, any class save only the “medicine men” of Rome. Nor could their successors disentangle themselves, as witness the recipe given above by Bassus for inscribing on the limpets’ shell the Gnostic formula, and Mr. Westwood’s words, “There is, in fact, more quaint and many-coloured superstition in a single page of Old Izaak than in all the forty-five chapters of the twentieth Book of the Geoponika. Silent are they touching mummies’ dust and dead men’s feet—silent on the fifty other weird and ghastly imaginations of the later anglers.”[117] And even the modern angler, if he thoroughly examine himself, must confess that some shred of gossamer still adheres. Does he not at times forgo, even if he boast himself incredulous of consequence, some act, such as stepping across a rod, lest it bring bad luck? If particular individuals rise superior, the ordinary fisherman in our present day still avows and still clings to superstitions or omens. Let him in the South of Ireland be asked whither he goes, meet a woman, or see one magpie, and all luck vanishes.[118] A dead hare (_manken_) regarded as a devil or witch a century ago brought _piscator_ nigh unto swooning.[119] Women seem usually fatal to good catches; as one instance out of many we read in Hollinshed’s _Scottish Chronicle_, that “if a woman wade through the one fresh river in the Lewis, there shall no salmon be seen there for a twelvemonth after.”