12 SALMONIA. 



the circumstance, that though a trout has 

 been hooked and played for some minutes, 

 he will often, after his escape with the arti- 

 ficial fly in his mouth, take the natural fly, 

 and feed as if nothing had happened ; having 

 apparently learnt only from the experiment, 

 that the artificial fly is not proper for food. 

 And I have caught pikes with four or five 

 hooks in their mouths, and tackle which they 

 had broken only a few minutes before ; and 

 the hooks seemed to have had no other 

 effect than that of serving as a sort of sauce 

 piquant e, urging them to seize another mor- 

 sel of the same kind. 



Phys. — Fishes are mute, and cannot plead, 

 even in the way that birds and quadrupeds 

 do, their own cause ; yet the instances you 

 quote only prove the intense character of 

 their appetites, which seem not so moderate 

 as Whiston imagined, in his strange philo- 

 sophical romance on the Deluge ; in which 

 he supposes, that in the antediluvian world 

 the heat was much greater than in this, and 

 that all terrestrial and aerial animals had 

 their passions so exalted by this high tern- 



