ANGLING, ANCIENT AND MODERN.*
BOOKS on angling multiply and keep a high level. No writer on a single sport has set himself a severer task than Mr. Radcliffe, who in his Fishing from the Earliest Times' surveys in close on 500 pages the history and development of angling from drawings preceding the art of writing down to the belles leUres of authors of yesterday, and in doing so ransacks the antiquities of Greece, Rome, Assyria, Egypt and China. The result is a book astonish. ing in its scope and variety. It is discursive, no doubt ; it is even marked here and there by an odd flippancy ; but it is a great single-subject book, and no one will lightly set out to supersede it.
Greek and Roman art and literature supply Mr. Radcliffe with his main field for research, and it is remarkable that after all these years he should be the first to discover the earliest reference to fly-fishing, which hitherto has been attributed to Aelian, but which he successfully proves is to be found in Martial's Epigrams. Aelian, writing about A.D. 200, describes how anglers in the Macedonian river Astraeus make an artificial fly called the Hippouros out of crimson wool and cock's feathers, with which they catch speckled fish—doubtless trout. But
• (1) Fishing from the Earliest Times. By William Radcliffe. Illustrated. London : Murray. [28s. net.]--(2) A History of Fly-fishing for Trout. By John Waller Hills. London: Philip Allan. [12s. ed. net.]—(3) The Way of a Trout with a Fly. By G. E. M. 81rues. Illustrated. London : Black. [18s. net.1---(4)By Loch and Stream. By R. C. Bridgett. Illustrated. London : Jenkins. [108. 8d. net.]—(5) Forty Years of Trout and Salmon Fishing. By J. L. Mirk. London: Heath Cranton. [12s. Od. net.]-- (0) Modern Sea Angling. By F. D. Holcombe. Illustrated. London: Warne. [21s. net.] Martial (e.n. 40-100) has a passage which must have been read by thousands before Mr. Radcliffe's observant eye " spotted " it as a distinct reference to a fish takings fly—" Otis nescit avidum vorata decipi scarum nausea 9" " Who has not seen the hungry scares deceived by the fly he has swallowed ? " The discovery is typical of Mr. Radcliffe's powers of research. He has been equally successful in other explorations. He shows that Aristotle, two thousand years before the Dutch microscopist Van Leeuwenhoek (who in turn was two centuries earlier than the next naturalist to touch the subject), discovered that the age of fish could be determined by inspection of their scales. He points out that Plutarch, who has been quoted by many writers, following the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, as detesting angling, merely puts his description of the " filthy employment " into the mouth of a character arguing in a debate. He devotes several pages to the examination of the possibility that in a much-discussed line of Martial—"Aril crescente levis traheretur harundine praeda"—the crescena harundo may be a fishing-rod, jointed as are rods of to-day. That the fowler used such a rod, tipping it with bird-lime, and adding a joint (or possibly blowing a thin piece through a hollow thick piece) in order to reach his quarry, is a known fact ; but unfortunately, in the passage quoted, it is practically certain from the context that the praeda here, too, must be a bird and not a fish, so that the quotation is in effect disappointing—though it is likely enough that the fisherman would imitate the fowler's weapon. We seem to get in the " lengthening reed," in any case, a queer link with the Chinese methods which supply Mr. Radcliffe with a characteristic chapter, for (though Mr. Radcliffe does not mention it) there is a type of Chinese fishing-rod which is formed of sections of hollow cane which shut up and extend like a tele- scope. The whole Chinese chapter, with its anecdotes of Imperial anglers, and of Hsu, a hero among fishermen, who took wine out with him and " drank and fished in turns," is a delightful medley. Of hundreds of other angling curiosities— Egyptian, Assyrian and Jewish—we may note a ghoulish Greek poem describing an Egyptian angling with hair taken from dead men_; an illustration of a reel used for a running line for hippopotamus spearing ; the earliest known illustration of a rod, 2000 B.c. ; and the photograph of the leg of an insect, Euryeanthq latro, used by New Guinea islanders as a natural fishhook. Mr. Radcliffe's selection of illustrations, indeed, is as curious and attractive as his text.
Major J. W. Hills, in his History of Fly-fishing for Trout, in a smaller volume covers, nevertheless, wide waters. His subject is the art of fly-fishing from the instructions given in the Boke of St. Albans to the latest essay on tactics of the chalk- stream, and he treats it with grace and knowledge. His first seven chapters deal mainly with angling authors and thei r directions for angling and making flies and tackle—he even has a digression on early fly-fishing in France—but though these are excellent examples of what such chapters should be and are salted with genial criticism, Major Hills is at his best when he comes to the evolution of the trout fly, as fished either dry or wet, and the identification in modern dressings of the standard patterns given first by the author of the Boke, and copied in turn from the Boke or one from another by Mescal], Walton and the rest. This is a fascinating exercise in research and deduction, and one which places Major Hills securely on the angler's bookshelf. He suggests that the best way to realize the progress of fly-fishers in choosing and tying their flies is to pick out a dozen insects which must have been present to the eye of the river-bank angler since the beginning of time, and to see how succeeding generations have copied them. He then chooses his twelve, the February Red, March Brown, Mayfly, Iron Blue, Alder and so on, and proceeds to ideally as many as he can in the old lists. He succeeds with practical certainty with seven, probably with eight—a remarkable illus- tration, as he claims, of the continuity of fly-fishing. When he comes to tracing the history of the dry fly he has fewer references in the older writers to help him as regards its origin. He quotes the first mention of the fly which "kills fish because it floats" as occurring in Scoteher's Fly-fishers' Legacy, published at Chepstow in 1800 ; and he believes that Pulman, in the 1851 edition of his Vade .Mecum, mentions for the first time the deliberate drying of the fly. But a detailed account of the beginnings of dry-fly fishing is plainly hard to come by. Is there not still an avenue left which might repay research ? May not the beginnings of dry-fly fishing have evolved themselves from the use of the natural fly, fished on a blow-line, just as it is
used for the may-fly season on Irish loughs to-day ? Richard Durnford, of Chilbolton, in his diaries of fishing on the Test in 1809-1819, frequently mentions this process, with reference to the strength of the wind—" sufficient " and so forth—for taking out the fly ; and it would be the wind, in this way, which would first teach the angler to fish his floating fly upstream. The transition from the natural to the artificial fly would be easy. Richard Durnford's Diary of a Test Fisherman might, indeed, be included in Major Hills's bibliography. The historical chapters are supplemented by a scholarly essay on the literature of fly- fishing, and a good book is made even better by admirable printing and paper.
Mr. Skues is one of the most thoughtful and independent of writers, as readers of his delightful book, Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, have known for years. The Way of a Trout with a Fly follows as ahappy companion to that fearless chronicle of experience and investigation. In part it records further conclusions derived from adventures with trout ; we get, for instance, accounts of the sequences of doubt, accident, trial and success which resulted in his discarding the time-worn axiom that there is no evening rise on a windy day, and the equally prevalent superstition that trout will not look at a fly when mist begins to rise from the water. Mr. Skues, having disproved ancient theories, is now enraged with the pundits whom he believed, and we derive benefit from his wrath. But the main purpose of the book is theoretical rather than reminis- cent, and Mr. Skues's subject is the art of trout-fly dressing. At what should the fly-dresser aim ? Should his object be to imitate the natural fly as closely as possible in colour, texture, size and shape ? But if so, he is met by the fact, daily and hourly evident, that trout will take artificial flies which are differently dressed to imitate the same fly, and also artificial flies which are unlike any fly. He is brought back, in any case, to an examination of what we )mow of a trout's vision. What can a trout see from under water, and when he sees it, what does it look like to him ? Mr. Skues does not determine these points finally ; he points out, indeed, that neither he nor anyone else can do so, for we do not know whether a trout's eye sees what we see. But, with close reasoning and ingenious argument, which make his pages fascinating reading, Mr. Skues does succeed in establishing point after point. He will convince all but the most impervious of disputants that a trout can distinguish colours, though the colours may not seem to him what they seem to us ; that he can taste and smell ; that he can appreciate size ; and that though he may see differences where we see likenesses, and vice versa,there is reason for the choice he makes, even if we do not know what the reason may be. These are admirable passages, and complete a singularly valuable addition to the literature of fly-fishing.
Mr. Bridgett* is mainly reminiscent. Like Thomas Stoddart before him, he has " angled far and angled wide," and here we have his recollections of days on many Scottish rivers and lochs, set down pleasantly and with occasional digressions into such questions as the proportions of different foods taken by trout, the reason which prompts salmon to seize a fly but not to feed in fresh water, and so on. Mr. Bridgett mentions, but does not enlarge upon, the curious fact that there are certain moments in the day when all the salmon in a river seem simultaneously to be " taking "—possibly in reminiscence of their habits in the sea. It is a theory which awaits further inquiry. Curiously enough, neither Mr. Bridgett nor Major Dickie,6 discussing the same question in. his amusing book of recollections of trout and salmon fishing, mention the fact that when salmon are taken on the worm—a detestable but frequently successful practice— the hook will be found in the fish's stomach, though the worms will have been ejected. This proves beyond doubt that salmon not only take into their mouths, but swallow food in fresh water. The fact is perhaps better known to anglers in Ireland than to Scottish fly-fishers, and the best of Major Dickie's chapters belong to that loveliest of rivers, the Aberdeenshire Dee.
Mr. Holcombe, in Modern Sea Angling,6 prefers the purely practical side of the sport, and within his limits he has put together an excellent volume. He is an acknowledged authority on his subject, and if a beginner, or for that matter an angler of experience, wants to know where to go for and how to catch sea fish, here is a book to tell him pretty nearly all there is to be said about them, from the enormous halibut and the dashing bass to the cod and the conner-eel.
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