baited hooks; barbed hooks; compound hooks; automatic hooks; accessories to hooks, such as lassos, sinkers, triggers, etc. It is impossible here to enter into the distribution of this vast collection of material in precolumbian times. It must not be overlooked, however, that angling became vastly more complicated after foreign contact. (See plate ii, b, c.)
Gripping devices imitate the closed fingers or closed hand, and they are represented by all kinds of lassos, bolas, chokers, and hand nooses; not traps, which belong to an entirely different class. The leister is a gripping device to which the function of seizing is added. In some forms this class has a distribution which is not fully worked out. For instance, bolas exist among the bird-eating tribes of Alaska and the guanaco-hunting tribes of southern South America (figure i, page 59). In colonial times trout-noosing existed in the eastern part of the United States.
Birds are caught in California by a running noose at the end of a pole. The Panamint Indians of California seize lizards in this way, and Rochefort describes a "gin having a running knot which is fastened to the end of a pole and cunningly got about the necks of the iguana lizards in order to get them out of the trees."
The distribution of the lasso is yet to be determined.
THIRD METHOD OF CAPTURE
The third method of taking animals is by striking or crushing. In its simplest form it involves only the use of the human body—the fist in striking, and the knee, the heel, or rolling stones in crushing. With increasing difficulty of capture this process is followed by striking with a weight in the hand, with a club, with a sling-shot or bola perdida, with a dart-sling or throwing-stick, with a sling or stone-bow, and with a blunt arrow. The beginning of such a series would be the fist, and the termination, the cannon-ball. Among traps the dead-fall occupies the same position.
In the Arctic regions, and, indeed, one might say universally throughout America, the club is an implement of capture either
