62 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE 



the great mental powers of the trout ; so do they. 

 He remarked on its great ability to learn 

 from experience ; its mastery of the disguises 

 of hooks ; its profound wisdom in old age so 

 do they. He wondered what trout thought about 

 him ; and to-day they raise conjectures on the 

 subject of what the old fellow " is saying to 

 himself " about them as he lurks in his favourite 

 hole beneath the big root of the alder-tree. 

 Neolithic man credited trout with firmly held views 

 as to the relative safety of blackthorn hooks 

 used with or without the bark, and his modern 

 descendant has merely changed the mechanism of 

 the opinion, and credits his quarry with views on 

 tinsel or hackel of hare lug. Then, as now, the 

 sceptical man who ventured (within reach of water) 

 to declare that trout have no power of thinking 

 at all, that they are as unteachable as a dead 

 machine, would stand in imminent danger of a 

 watery martyrdom as fit retribution for his most 

 accursed heresy. 



And yet the heretic would be very near the 

 truth, for it is only in fables and anglers' tales 

 that fish are creatures of intelligence. They are 

 born with a certain endowment of fear, suspicion, 

 and fixed utilitarian instinct, and an endowment 

 which experience hardly, if at all, modifies up or 

 down. When a naturalist wishes to find examples 

 of unteachableness he goes to the fish kingdom ; 

 for though fish stand higher in the order of life 

 than the insects and other articulated creatures, 

 their adaptive intelligence is universally lower. A 

 spider, for example, may be taught in ten minutes 



