SILK-WOUM GUT. 109 



of leaders least visible to the fish, however commendable, are 

 sure to end in disappointment ; such, at least, has been my 

 experience. Experiments to this end have been made by 

 practical anglers for many years "with no other result than to 

 show that the finer the gut the better, without reference to 

 color. ^ly own experiments in this direction have not been 

 few, and I have demonstrated, to my own satisfaction at 

 least, that any color of leader or snell will answer equally 

 well, from hyaline to black, though I confess that I was 

 formerly partial to a slight bluish stain, or mist color, and 

 perhaps without any well-defined reason, except that it 

 ought to be least visible to the fish. 



But when we enter the province of speculation and con- 

 jecture, and try to see for the fish, or, in other words, to 

 measure their visual capacity by our own, we are doomed to 

 disappointment, though we bring to our aid all the known 

 resources of the science of optics. I lately read, some- 

 where, that an English angler declared that the salmon took 

 the fly under the delusion that it was a shrimp, because 

 while said angler was beneath the surface of the water, the 

 artificial flies on the surface appeared to him like shrimps. 

 To have made some show of proving his statement he 

 should have first demonstrated that salmon could be taken 

 with'shrimp bait as successfully, and in the same situations, 

 as with the fly. 



The only way to experiment with profit, in this direction, 

 is to experiment Avith the fish themselves, otherwise our ef- 

 forts will be like the play of Hamlet with the melancholy 

 Dane left out. The sense of sight in fishes is but little un- 

 derstood, as is, indeed, the anatomy of their visual organs, 

 which fact precludes all analogous reasoning from our own 

 standpoint, alone. I have satisfied myself, however, that 



