The South Sea Islanders, like the Maoris, are skilful and most persevering fishermen, and adopt a variety of methods to add to their simple diet the fish which cruise around the reefs and rocks. Some of their wholesale methods of capture are very ingenious. The spears have barbed prongs, or they bristle with sharp fishbones, and most hunters of curios will probably have found in native huts carefully preserved specimens as much prized as war implements, and as worthy of collection. The natives in many of the islands are adroit in fishing the reefs with stake nets, and a kind of shrimp net stretched on poles is used for the fry resembling whitebait. Traps are manufactured of plaited cane, and artistically designed with something like a pattern. The general idea is to produce a basket into which the fish can enter but not return. In one of the islands I heard of another trap made of prickly palm branches, which answers the same purpose as the basket, though it is a much simpler affair, and is placed on the edge of the reef by the fisherman diving and putting a stone on the tether, leaving its whereabouts to be indicated by a float. The natives have rudely understood the art of spinning for ages, and their bait is a pearl shell shaped like a fish, with a tortoiseshell hook attached. The point of this is sometimes bent inwards like a shepherd's crook, and sometimes only slightly curved. One pattern is fashioned bodily out of a clam shell, but to this a bait is fixed. Iron hooks are made from nails, and by never allowing the fish a chance of turning, the natives become adepts in dragging out fish with their barbless and primitive contrivances. On many of the smaller islands which find no place on maps, there are temporary fishing stations visited by the natives at the seasons when they know by long tradition payable fishing is to be had. Turtles are caught by lassoing.