The apparatus of a Greek sportsman would appear somewhat cumbersome, and perhaps a little ludicrous to a modern Nimrod. But understanding their own object they went their own way to work; their arms and implements, varying with the chase in which they were engaged, consisted of short swords, hunting knives[714] for the purpose of cutting down brushwood to stop up openings in the forest, axes for felling trees, darts furnished with thongs for drawing them back when they had missed their aim, bows, boar-spears, weapons peculiarly formidable, nets small and large, some for setting up in the plains, some for traversing glades or narrow alleys in the woods, and others shaped like a female head-net, to be placed in small dusky openings, where being unperceived the game sprang into them as into a sack, which closed about it by means of a running cord, net-poles, forked stakes, snares, gins, nooses, and leashes for the dogs.[715] The darts used on these occasions had ashen or beechen handles, and the nets were usually manufactured with flax imported from Colchis on the Phasis, Egypt, Carthage, and Sardinia.[716] Generally, too, they took along with them the Lagobalon, a short, crooked stick with a knob at one end, with which they sometimes brought down the hare in its flight.[717] This practice, common enough among poachers in our country, is by them denominated _squailing_. Footnote 714: Poll. v. 19. Footnote 715: Cf. Grat. Falisc. Cyneg. p. 14. Wase. Footnote 716: Xen. Cyneg. ii. 3. Grat. Falisc. Cyneg. p. 6. Wase. Pollux, v. 26. Footnote 717: Spanh. Obs. in Callim. Hymn. in Dian. ii. p. 122. Poll. v. 20.—Hares are hunted with sticks in South Guinea by the blacks.—Barbot. iii. 14. Without the aid of dogs, however, hunting is a poor sport. The ancients, therefore, much addicted to this branch of education, paid great attention to the breed of these animals, of which some were sought to be rendered celebrated by heroic and fabulous associations. Thus the Castorides, it was said, sprang[718] from a breed to which the twin god of Sparta was partial; the Alopecidæ were a cross between a dog and a she-fox; and a third kind[719] arose from the mingling of these two races. Among modern sportsmen, there are also good authorities who prefer harriers with a quarter of the fox-strain.[720] Other kinds of hounds, as the Menelaides and Harmodian derived their appellation from the persons who reared them.[721] Footnote 718: Poll. v. 39. Xen. Cyneg. iii. 1. Footnote 719: Arist. Hist. Anim. viii. 28. Poll. v. 39. Footnote 720: Letters on Hunting, p. 60. Footnote 721: Poll. v. 40.