ITS FLY FISHING FOE TROUT. 



than most of us, will one day give us the result 

 of his experience. 



So much for fly dressing; now for pictures. 

 The earliest, in Lawson's notes to the Secrets of 

 Angling (1620) tells nothing, for it is clearly a 

 stock illustration, made by someone who knew 

 less than nothing of fishing. Nor are the next 

 any better, those on Venables' frontispiece. If 

 we are to go by them, his flies were clumsy and 

 wingless, with fat bodies and sparse hackle; 

 but I hardly think that much reliance can be 

 placed on them. 



In fact there are no illustrations of any 

 value until the end of the eighteenth century. 

 At that date there is a plate in Sir John 

 Hawkins' edition of the Compleat Angler (it is 

 in his fourth edition of 1784 and no doubt also 

 in his first of 1760) and there is one not unlike 

 it, copied from it I suspect, in Best's Concise 

 Treatise of 1787. Some contemporary editions 

 of Bowlker also have the same flies, all possibly 

 from the same source. Six flies are figured in 

 Best, for example, two hackled and four 

 winged, varying in size from the Green Drake 

 to the Ant Fly. They are large and clumsy, 

 but not over-winged or over-hackled, and pro- 

 bably we must take them as typical. I think, 

 however, that Cotton would have had another 

 laugh at their portly bodies. 



The first artistic picture of artificials is in 

 1826. An edition of Bowlker appeared in that 

 year with an admirable coloured plate of thirty 



