33aafe Walton anb Cbarles Cotton 41 



any acknowledgment, and, what Is more, spoils them by 

 " variations " of his own, which only serve to exhibit his 

 plentiful lack of knowledge. 



The credulity of" Father Izaak" is amazing. It will 

 swallow anything which the "learned Thebans," for whom 

 he had so superstitious a reverence, choose to assert. 

 Its capacity for gorging the marvellous is worthy of the 

 great pike on whose voracity he comments. He believes 

 that " the marrow of the thigh bone of a heron is a great 

 temptation to any fish " ; that pike are generated from 

 the pickerel weed ; that frogs settle on the heads of carp 

 and ride the fish to death ; that eels are bred " either 

 of dew or out of the corruption of the earth " ; that 

 " barnacles and young goslings are bred by the sun's 

 heat and the rotten planks of an old ship, and hatched 

 of trees" ; that there is a river in Arabia "of which all 

 the sheep that drink thereof have their wool turned into 

 a vermilion colour," and another in Judaea "that runs 

 swiftly all the six days of the week and stands still and 

 rests all the Sabbath " ; that in the Ganges " there be 

 eels thirty feet long " ; that " dolphins love music and will 

 come when called for." All these things and a thousand 

 others equally ludicrous to the well-informed person of 

 the nineteenth century Master Izaak Walton believed 

 in. His knowledge of natural history, derived, as it 

 mostly was, from what were called in his days " learned 

 writers," principally Germans, was the strangest mixture 

 of fable and imperfectly understood fact. To distrust 

 a " learned writer " would have seemed little short of 

 impiety to one of such a reverential temperament as 

 Walton. But I cannot help regretting that the good 



