THE CUNNING OF TROUT 65 



with a confection of steel, feathers, tinsel, and hair. 

 There were wary and less wary fish in the waters 

 when man began to operate with rod and line. 

 The wary strain, or the more wary members of 

 it, have survived to multiply their kind, while 

 the unwary and the less wary have found their 

 way into the basket. Thus the fish in much- 

 fished rivers have not acquired their reputation 

 for cunning because greater experience has taught 

 them: more, but because all the simpletons have 

 been taken out. Nor is the case of the cunning 

 old trout at all destructive of this theory of 

 elimination. It is argued that this trout must 

 have learned a lot, or he would never have grown 

 so old. But the dangers of the old trout were 

 just as great they were even greater when he 

 was young as they are now that he is old. As he 

 successfully eluded them then, the probability is 

 that he was as naturally wary then as now. The 

 theory that fish are taught great cunning by 

 experience is hardly capable of statement in a 

 particular case, and is, indeed, always set forth in 

 general terms applicable to entire rivers. Just 

 consider the amount and kind of experience neces- 

 sary to teach a trout the sort of angler -defy ing 

 wisdom attributed to it. It is known already 

 that the amount of experience needed to teach a 

 fish is very great, and in this case the kind of it 

 must be actual contact with a hook. By this 

 proposition, therefore, the fish must have been on 

 a hook and escaped hundreds of times, if hundreds 

 of experiments would suffice to impress the kind 

 of brain which fails, after months of constant 

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