Before proceeding on our search for further data two points should be emphasised. First, the period covered even by the longest historical or semi-historical record counts but as a fraction of the time since geology and archæology prove Man to have existed on earth. Grant, if you will, the demand of the most exacting Egyptologists or Sumerologists, to whom a thousand years are as nothing; concede their postulated five or six thousand years; of what account is one lustrum of millenniums when compared with the years—not less than two million according to some geologists[3]—which have elapsed since Man first came on the scene? Second, all the above nations possessed an advanced civilisation. Neither civilisation nor fishing is a Jovelike creation, springing into existence armed _cap-à-pie_. Both, like our friend Topsy, “growed,” and both demanded long periods for growth and development from their primitive origin. In fishing these were retarded by the innate conservatism of the followers of the cult. The psychology of the faithful is an odd blend of dogged, perhaps unconscious, adherence to the olden ways and of an almost Athenian curiosity about “any new thing,” which as often as not sees itself discarded in favour of the ancient devices. Even in this year of our Lord a cousin of mine, who Ulysses-like many rivers has known, much tackle tested, habitually (influenced no doubt by the recipe for the line given by Plutarch and passed on by Dame Juliana Berners) inserts between his line and his gut some eighteen inches of horse hair! But even in him the law of development works, for he does not Pharisaically adhere to the strict letter of the text, and insist that the hair comes only from the tail of a stallion or gelding![4] Then, again, not less than two thousand odd years were needed for the Rod and the Line of Ælian’s Macedonian angler to take unto themselves a cubit or so more of length than their Egyptian predecessors.[5] The latter may, however, have been rendered shorter than actually used from the regard paid to artistic convention by the craftsman of Beni-Hasan. But the connection of the line to the rod furnishes the most arresting instance of conservatism or slow development. Progress from the Egyptian method, which made fast the line to the top of the rod,[6] to a “running line” took, so far as discoverable records show, no less a period than that between _c._ 2000 B.C. and our sixteenth or seventeenth century, _i.e._ some 3600, or (according to Petrie) over 5000, years!