there can be no remedy for the dogfish plague. So immense are their hordes that they cannot be driven away from the fishinggrounds, but must be caught, if possible, for sale.

At irregular intervals, the octopus is another expensive enemy of the fishermen. The hostility of the rest is of small account. Cormorants may damage the limited resources of a trout-stream, but their drafts on the balance of the sea are insignificant. There are men who even pretend to regard gulls as active enemies of the fishermen, but not of these are the fishermen themselves, at any rate in Cornwall, where they rely on these birds to keep their harbours clean, averting epidemic and removing a reproach that would soon banish summer visitors over-sensitive to such impressions. Of all the untrue bills found from time to time against the seagulls, perhaps the most plausible was that of a Fellow of the Royal Society who, three years ago, blandly declared, on some audacious hypothesis best known to himself, that the number of these birds on our coasts could be placed at 2,000,000, and that the annual damage done by them to the herring fisheries represented a sum of 24,000,000l. Here of a truth is a mathematical feat to which the quadrature of the circle should be child's play.

Porpoises must consume vast quantities of fish, but being constantly on the move and not haunting the same grounds for weeks like dogfish, their inroads are less felt and the damage more distributed. They may, moreover, be unrecognised benefactors of the fishermen, since Shetlanders so regard their cousins, the whales, which they say not only drive the herring shoals towards the coast, but also guide the fleets to their whereabouts. For this reason they bitterly resent the recent revival in the whale fishery by Norwegian and Scotch capitalists.

Of minor fishermen's sorrows, dependent on local conditions, the name is legion. Sennen men have been threatened with loss of their grey mullet because the rocks were stripped bare of seaweed to manure the neighbouring farms. The cockle-fishermen of Leigh have been brought to the verge of starvation because those shellfish are suspected (probably with reason) by Dr. Klein and other authorities of transmitting the bacillus of typhoid. A similar scare was launched in the press not long ago in respect of Thames 'whitebait,' but without so far having any serious consequences for the fishery. These are cases of ruin from purely natural causes. Now and then high politics and fiscal juggling step in to take away the fisherman's source of livelihood. Brighton trawlers

have lost the once profitable direct trade with Paris, via Newhaven, because of prohibitive taxation by the French Government, and the re-imposition of a similar tax on cured pilchards imported into Italy now threatens to bring starvation to many Cornish homes.

The sorrows of the fisherman might be swelled to a much longer list, but even from what has been said the reader will have little difficulty in appreciating the hardships of his life. The difficulty is rather in understanding how new generations of these toilers can be found to replace the old. As a matter of fact, if inquiries were made at Brixham and other ports in which the apprentice still plays a part, it would be found that there is a growing tendency on the part of the younger stock not indeed to stay on the land, where there is no room even for those bred to the plough, but to emigrate to America or go to sea in other capacities. The Navy has of late years held out greater inducements than it did in the old days of crimping and the cat,' and masters of smacks find increasing difficulty in enlisting willing and efficient apprentices.

Yet there will always be a supply of such labour. The call of the sea is in their blood, and the knowledge of fishing in their bone. The soyez plutôt maçon si c'est votre talent mandate rules on the water as well as on the land, and adaptability is not among the fisherman's virtues. Natural and political forces conspire to crush them, but they persist. It is their fate. We pity them, and, handicapped by the poverty of our idiom, we call theirs a dog's life and think that we have said the worst. Dog's life? The most persecuted pariah of a Moorish village basks by comparison in the lap of luxury!

F. G. AFLAlo.

232

INDEXES.

To enjoy making an index may seem a strange taste, and yet men of parts have taken a pleasure in such work, and have done it, for a book in which they were interested, without fee or reward. There is, indeed, a great advantage in making the index to a book which the indexer has often to consult. A lady who was commissioned to index an important work was afterwards gently reproached by a friend for the absence of references to numerous topics. Of course, I did not put in anything in which I was not interested,' she explained simple-heartedly, and the mere possibility of getting paper and print provided for an index compiled entirely from one's own standpoint is in some cases good consideration for the trouble. of making it. Yet, although an index may be made as explanatory of aims and standpoints as a preface, and in far greater detail, most authors scorn to index their own books, and there is sufficient indexing work to be had to have created a class of trained professional indexers. The professional index seldom pleases me. It is mostly very bulky, and pervaded by what may be called (to borrow a phrase from logic) ignoratio elenchi, a tendency to emphasise mere casual remarks, and to send students for new information to pages where the author has but repeated a commonplace. Of course there is a set off. The trained indexer should make a better choice of words and work more neatly. But unless she (it is mostly she) knows enough of the subject to act as an honest broker between author and reader, divining what the reader wants, and making the most of the help which the book gives, no technical skill will save the index from being a failure.

Until printing had been invented for some generations there was little room for the professional indexer, trained or untrained; but some of the early indexes which were made as a labour of love are surprisingly good. The first indexer of a printed book whose name is known to me was a person of some distinction, Thomas Dorniberg, of Memmingen, a doctor of canon law, who, in 1472, was piously moved to index the 'De Quattuor Virtutibus,' of Henricus Ariminensis, to the glory and honour of the most high and undivided Trinity, and of the immaculate birthgiver of the

Incarnate Word, the most glorious Virgin Mary; and of all the
heavenly court of citizens on high, and to the profit and use of all
who desire to advance in virtuous living.' In the preface, which
begins with this dedication, Dorniberg shows clearly the use to
which he meant his index to be put. The appetite for sermons in
the fifteenth century seems to have severely taxed the powers of
the parochial clergy, and numerous attempts were made to help
them, both by the publication of ready-made sermons, and by pro-
viding quarries out of which the sermon-writer might hew at will
the exempla, or stories, with which to point his morals and keep
his audience awake. In his preface, Dorniberg, knowing the pur-
pose for which his index would be used, explains that, although
the exempla are not separately indexed, they will always be found
at the end of the chapter to which they refer.

Thus, if we take the subject of any chapter, or part of it, from the title of this
a beautiful example is immediately found, answering to the same subject. For
instance, from the letter A we take the entry' Acceptation of gifts works four ill
effects,' of which the first is that justice is bartered for a petty price. This is
treated in Tract ii., chapter 5, section viii. There you have a beautiful example
on your subject, showing how King Cambyses caused the skin of a certain bad
judge, a lover of gifts, to be stripped from his body and stretched upon the seat
of judgment. Upon this seat he commanded the man's son to sit, giving him to
understand that he should judge others justly, lest he be condemned to a like
punishment. And thus, through the whole book, at least one beautiful example
will be found in illustration of every authority, quotation, and title.

Acceptation' does not seem a very good heading for this story.
A modern indexer would probably enter it under Justice, or Bribery,
or Gifts. But in the fifteenth century an index was supposed to
be read and studied, not merely consulted in a hurry for a single
entry, and its alphabetical form was only given it to facilitate
subsequent reference by those who had duly perused it from begin-
ning to end. The entries, in fact, were just the old entries of the
Tabula Materiarum,' or Table of Contents, which followed the
order of the book, shuffled into alphabetical sequence, without any
great effort to begin with the right word.

If index-making was as yet defective in the choice of words,
we can see from Dorniberg's preface that much thought had been
given to the form of the reference. The numbering of leaves was
only very slowly coming into use, and no one had as yet thought
of numbering them on both sides, or pages. Hence the text was
divided and subdivided, as much as possible, into books, chapters,
and sections, and where the text did not lend itself to formal sub-

division on this plan, it was divided into artificial lengths or paragraphs, marked with the successive letters of the alphabet. When leaves came to be numbered, symbols were invented, showing to which side of the leaf, and to which column on a page the reference applied. Dorniberg was quite interested in such points as these, and gives elaborate explanations of his method of shortening a reference partly identical with that for the previous entry.

The index to the De Quattuor Virtutibus' seems to have been appreciated, and within less than a year Dorniberg had been moved by the prayers of many studious clerks' to compile another. The work chosen this time was the 'Compendium Theologicae Veritatis.' This Compendium of Theological Truth' he considered ' useful and necessary, not only to those having the care of souls, but to all ecclesiastics of whatever order, dignity, or rank. To all such persons it should be the principal and most familiar of books as embracing briefly, concisely, and authoritatively the foundations and principles of the whole Catholic theology and faith, without knowledge of which no one deserves to be called a clerk, or hardly even a Christian.' Having this high opinion of the book, Dorniberg set to work to reduce its chief topics to alphabetical order and compile a duly arranged index. This he finished on the vigil of St. Bartholomew (August 23), 1473, and brought his task to a close with the words 'Here ends the Register. Thanks be to God.'

Elsewhere, in his preface to his second index, Dorniberg speaks of it as a 'tabula remissoria,' a table of references, but Registrum seems to have been the ordinary name in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it is the English form of this word that enters into Chaucer's verse in the passage in the 'Knightes Tale,' where he disclaims all knowledge of Arcite's fate after death. The poet's real reason for this reticence was that he had already, in his 'Troilus,' used the fine passage from Boccaccio's 'Teseide' as to Arcite looking down from the spheres, amazed at the littleness of the world which had seemed to him so great. The passage applies much more effectively to Troilus than to Arcite, but now that Chaucer was refashioning the Teseide' in his own way, here was a purple patch gone, so he wickedly leapt over the gap with the gibe:

I nam no divynistre :

'Of soules' find I nought in this registre :

i.e. I can find no entry concerning souls' in my index, and su