FROM COTTON TO STEWART. 89 



Art of Angling 1747.* When he wrote he 

 found most authors, overlooking the highly 

 original work of Chetham, engaged in slavishly 

 copying either the Treatise or Cotton. Bowlker 

 gives a list of twenty-nine flies, all easily 

 recognisable; and what is more important he 

 definitely rejects 'many other Flyes taken 

 Notice of in Treatises of Angling,' among them 

 most of our old friends which date from Dame 

 Juliana. And it was high time they went; 

 for their original derivation had long been 

 forgotten, their very names were corrupted and 

 had become meaningless counters, unrelated to 

 the natural insects from which they were 

 copied. Bowlker pillories them by name, and 

 from his time the Ruddy Fly, the Sandy Yellow 

 Fly, the Moorish Fly and the Twine Fly 

 disappear from fishing literature. Cotton, it 

 is true, had preceded Bowlker in rejecting 

 them, and so had Chetham; but Cotton did not 

 renounce them by name, and indeed could 

 not because of filial piety, for Walton had 

 swallowed them whole. Besides, Cotton's list 

 is too long and the attribution of his names to 

 natural flies is often impossible ; added to which 

 the list of the Treatise was repeated by many 

 writers long after Cotton. After Bowlker it 

 disappears, and instead his list survives with 

 little change till to-day. 



*The first edition of Bowlker is undated, but Mr. Turrell in 

 Ancient Angling Authors says that it is dated 1747 in the 

 catalogue of the Bodleian Library. Bibliotheca Piscatoria 

 gives 1753, with a query. 



