an insect with outspread gauzy wings would so fall; but he does not imitate (or if he does so, his practice proceeds upon an erroneous principle), either in the air or his favourite element, the flight or the motion of a particular species, because he also knows that trouts are much less conversant in entomology than M. Latreille, and that their omnivorous propensities induce them, when inclined for food, to rise with equal eagerness at every minute thing which creepeth upon the earth or swimmeth in the waters. On this fact he generalises, and this is the philosophy of fishing.

"We are therefore of opinion that all, or a great proportion, of what has been so often, and sometimes so well, said about the great variety of flies necessary to an angler,-about the necessity of changing his tackle according to each particular month throughout the season,-about one fly being adapted solely to the morning, another to noonday, and a third to the evening, and about every river having its own particular flies, &c., is, if not altogether erroneous, at least greatly exaggerated and misconceived. That determinate relations exist between flies of a certain colour and particular conditions of a river is, we doubt not, true; but these are rather connected with angling as an artificial science, and have but little to do with any analogous relations in nature. The great object, by whatever means to be accomplished, is to render the fly deceptive; and this, from the very nature of things, is continually effected by fishing with flies which differ in colour and appearance from those which prevail upon the water; because, in truth, none else can be purchased or procured. Even admitting, for a moment, the theory of representation, when a particular fly prevails upon a river, an artificial one, in imitation of it, will never resemble it so closely as to appear the same to those below (i. e. the fish): on the contrary, a certain degree of resemblance, without anything like an exact similitude, will only render the finny tribe the more cautious through suspicion; while a different shape and colour, by exciting no minute or invidious comparisons, might probably be swallowed without examination. Indeed, it seems sufficiently plain, that where means of comparison are allowed, and where exact imitation is at the same time impossible, it is much better to have recourse to a general idea than to an awkward and bungling individual representation. How often has it been asserted, with all the gravity of sententious wisdom, that the true mode of proceeding in fly-fishing is to busk your hook by the river-side, after beating the shrubs to see what colour of insect prevails! A very expert angler, who perhaps carried the opposite theory rather too far, although he always filled his pannier, was in the habit of stirring the briars and willows to ascertain what manner of fly was not there, and with that he tempted the fishes. The man was a humorist in his way, and in this particular case an erroneous humorist, as many wiser folks have been when driven into one extreme by the foolish prevalence of its opposite. But he certainly had the advantage of his antagonists in a wider field of action and invention, the world being all before him where to choose, and no especial pocket-book his guide."The Rod, &c., pp. 10-13.

Το

To much of this we readily assent: but we have seen wonders performed by a man who did sit down and imitate, after a fashion, a fly then on the water, and at which the fish were rising, whilst another, who cast quite as deftly, was plying his rod with one ready-made fly after another, unlike that on the water, without raising a single fish. Not that our late worthy friend Mr. George Bainbridge, of Gattonside juxta Melrose, was not quite right when he stated that flies, however fanciful or varied in shade or materials, will frequently raise fish when all the imitations of nature have proved unsuccessful. Indeed,' says he, very truly, 'so fastidious and whimsical are the salmon at times, that the more brilliant and extravagant the fly the more certain is the angler of his diversion.' A Scotch lady-no mean proficient in her art said to a friend, who is as good an angler as he is a zoologist, that they had taught the salmon in their river to take gaudy flies.' By the way, the spotted and banded feathers from the breast of the Caracara eagle (Polyborus Brasiliensis) have proved irresistible in some salmon-rivers.

Mr. Wilson had previously laid it down that—

There is, in truth, little or no connexion between angling and the science of entomology; and therefore the success of the angler, in by far the greater proportion of cases, does not depend on the resemblance which subsists between his artificial fly and the natural insect. This statement is no doubt greatly at variance with the expressed principles of all who have deemed fishing worthy of consideration from the days of Isaiah and Theocritus to those of Carrol and Bainbridge. But we are not the less decidedly of opinion, that in nine instances out of ten a fish seizes upon an artificial fly as upon an insect or moving creature sui generis, and not on account of its exact and successful resemblance to any accustomed and familiar object.'—Ibid, pp. 7, 8.

Certainly the inventor of Sam Slick, Long Tom, and The Professor (Wilson, of course), however wayward' the hour' may have been when those killing monsters were conceived, has a right to be pertinacious, the more especially as he possesses ' above ten thousand kinds of insects: but we cannot give up the theory of imitation, clumsy enough, we admit, when the original standard flies were efforts at least to make something like the insects whose names many of them bear. Indeed Mr. Wilson himself says elsewhere (p. 7) that fly-fishing must not be regarded exclusively as an art of imitation.' And again—

It is admitted that during midsummer, when the weather is calm, the sky clear, and the river low, and when what is called fine fishing is necessary, such imitation as is possible, both of the appearance and motions of the natural fly, may frequently be tried with advantage; in which case the tackle may be allowed to drop gently down the stream;

but

but it more usually happens, from the style of fishing practised during the vernal and autumnal states of a river, that the hook is not deceptive from its appearing like a winged fly which has fallen from its native element, but from its motion and aspect resembling that of some aquatic insect. When the end of the line first falls on the surface of the water the fish may be deceived by the idea of a natural fly; and it is on that account that the angler should throw his tackle lightly and with accuracy, and it is on that account also that we would advise the more frequent throwing of the line: but so soon as the practitioner begins to describe his semicircle across the river, the character of the lure is changed, and the trout then seizes the bait, not as a drowning insect, but as a creature inhabiting its own element, which had ventured too far from the protection of the shallow shore or the sedgy bank. That this is the case a subsidiary argument may also be drawn from the fact, that in most rivers the greater number and the finest fish are generally killed by the drag-fly, which, during the process of angling, swims an inch or two under water. It is sometimes even advisable so to angle as to convert into drags all the flies in use.'-Ibid., p. 19.

Our experience has been uniformly in favour of the drowning or dragging process; and we appeal to the same friend to whom we have before referred for the truth of it. By the bye, when he produced his flies, which were all neat, trimly dressed,' like Sum Slick and the rest of them, to the old fisherman on the Carron-side,' the said fisherman shook his head, like Lord Burleigh himself. At length he pitched on one, and after nipping it, and clipping it, and stripping it, and then pulling back the wings to make them stand staring up, instead of lying decently down, and drawing the whole fly through his fingers backwards, till, all disheveled and bedeviled, it looked as if it had been drawn through a furze-bush the wrong way, the fisherman said he thought that might do'-and so it did. Our friend, after that, busked all his flies as the fisherman taught him, with the wings put on the wrong way, so to speak, standing up or leaning towards the shank of the hook,--and he had the best of sport. The effect of this mode of dressing was, that the fly, when under water, where it was always taken, would open and shut, as it were, with a kind of systole and diastole, like the motion in the umbrella of a Medusa, or sea-nettle. In short the appearance of life was given to the bait, the great art in all imitative fishing. Thus much for salmon-fishing that the system of sinking the fly holds good in lake-fishing for trout, so far as the taking of large fish are concerned, the following instance, related by another good friend of ours, shows. He was fishing in a lake in South Wales. Now, all anglers know that the fish in certain rivers have their favourite flies-the coachman, for instance, was, perhaps is, the fashion in

the

the Colne; and in the Welsh lakes, where our friend fished, you might as well have thrown yourself in as anything but a coch y bón du (we write under Welsh correction) or, as it is uttered by the Saxon, cock-a-bondy. It is intended for an imitation of one of the lady-birds (coccinella), and to make the fly well you should have a red-cock's hackle, with a black quill, to get which look for a red cock with black legs. But, to our tale. Our friend and another angler embarked in the same boat. The other angler fished on the surface: he killed more fish than our friend, but those taken by the latter, who drowned his fly, were all fine fish, and equalled in weight the more numerous fry of his brother sportsman.

With regard to the comparison of this branch of angling with sculpture, above alluded to, Mr. Wilson gives no sign of being aware that we have here in the south an example of the highest art in both, in the person of Sir Francis Chantrey.*

We must now take leave of Mr. Wilson, with a hint that, when next the unwetted gut still lies in rebellious and unyielding circles on the surface' (p. 27), he will find a little Indian rubber, properly applied, very useful in quelling the rebellion, without any danger of rubbing out the line

The Loch-for our limits forbid the Moor-next claims our attention. We understand the author, Mr. John Colquhoun, is not, as we had at first surmised, the erudite penman of Isis Revelata,' but a nephew of his-if a pupil, we beg leave to congratulate them both. The whole composition is unpretending, clear, and practical, and does honour to the parent lake.' The book breathes of the mountain and the flood, and will carry the sportsman back to the days of his youth, when he could sleep well in a chimney-less bothy, with his pony on one side, a cow on the other, and the shepherd and shepherdess, with their progeny, nestled in wattled cubitories all round-his head on a turf and his feet to the peat.

The true angler,' says Mr. Colquhoun, is almost always a lover of nature; if not, he loses half the pleasure of his art. In following the river's course, he must of necessity pass through the finest and most varied scenery; and that too at a time when beauty crowns the year. But, enchanting as are the woodland-banks of the quiet stream, there is to me a higher and yet more powerful charm in the solitary wildness or savage grandeur of the Highland loch. The very stillness of those bare hills and craggy summits, broken only by the rushing of some rapid burn that intersects them, has a tendency to elevate while it

* It is said that when Madame Malibran first visited the great sculptor in his studio, she addressed him, from her frank, feeling, and good heart, with, How happy you must be in the midst of this your beautiful creation! To which he, with equal sincerity, though a little to her surprise, replied, I'd rather be a-fishing."

calms

calms the mind; and I envy not the man who could frequent such scenes and not feel them.

But if the proficient in the gentle craft has an eye equally keen to the beauties so lavishly scattered around him, it happens no less often that the admirer of nature's wildest charms fancies himself an angler. Our man of taste has, perhaps, fished a few rivers near him, in the spring, when trout are lean and hungry; and, having chosen a propitious day, has sometimes returned with a tolerable creelful. He then starts on his pleasure-tour, and of course his fishing-rod forms an important accompaniment. At first he makes some determined attacks upon the finny tribe; but, being generally unsuccessful, his rod is laid aside, and, after having been delighted with the sublimities and beauties of half the Highlands, he returns home with but an indifferent account of his piscatorial achievements. To such an one I particularly address the few simple directions in loch-fishing, which time and patience have enabled me to collect.'-The Moor and the Loch, pp. 56, 57.

Here are good observations on the introduction of pike to keep down the shoals of small, ill-fed trout, with a striking instance of the voracity of the ravenous luce :—

Many people think a loch injured by pike: on the contrary, unless very numerous, as in Loch Menteith, I have seldom seen one much worth fishing without them; always excepting those where the Loch Awe trout or gillaroo are to be found. If a man prefers killing eight or nine dozen, with scarcely a half-pounder among them, to a dozen fine trout from one to three pounds weight, then he may count the pike his enemy; but the latter feat will both better prove his skill and afford him much greater sport. He who wishes to excel in angling will leave the loch with its tiny multitude to the bungler, and select the other, where all his science will be called into play.

The reason why yellow trout are always large where there are pike is obvious: the small fry are all devoured by the latter, and the others, having more food, increase in size. A few years ago Loch Katrine was choke-full of very small trout, which have gradually become larger since pike have been introduced; and now two or three dozen fine red trout may be taken in a day.

There are two other small lochs, near Loch Katrine, which breed very large pike, and are full of prime trout, Loch Arklet and Loch Dronkie; but less fortunate than their neighbours in not having been immortalized by our Great Minstrel: the latter especially, from its illsounding name, we cannot wonder that a poet discards, but an angler will find its attractions. The shores of these lochs being almost clear of weeds, and the ground firm, the best parts may be reached by wading, and fish taken from half a pound to three pounds weight. Upon one occasion, when playing a good-sized trout in Loch Dronkie, an enormous pike made several dashes, and at last succeeded in seizing it. I used every effort to frighten him away; but so determined was he, that, though I could see him quite plainly in shallow water, with my trout held across his tremendous jaws, he would not be beat off; and at last when,