124 LETTERS TO YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



VI. 



FLIES. 



I SUPPOSE if we were to rate the relative importance 

 of different points in angling by the books written about 

 them and by all the talk we make about them, we 

 should come to the conclusion at once that the flies 

 were the things that mattered ; that everything else 

 was scarcely to be named beside them. It is a subject on 

 which 1 am free to deliver myself of the perilous heterodoxy 

 that I believe they matter very little. I wish you would get 

 for your study a book called " Animal Life Under Water," 

 by Francis Ward, M.D. I am rather glad that I do not know 

 the writer, for if I did I should hardly like publicly to commend 

 his book in an open letter such as this. But he explains well, 

 both in text and by illustration, how objects appear to a 

 fish's vision. He explains shortly, though it would take 

 me far too long to try to make an even shorter sketch of his 

 explanation here ; but when you have read it you may then 

 begin to recast your ideas about the imitations which you 

 will float over the fish, or will try so to float. The total 

 impression that I have gained from his book, so far as it 

 concerns us here and so far as it can be summed up in a sentence, 

 is : See to it that you get the form of the fly and the size 

 like the original on which you believe the ffsh to be feeding. 

 The colour matters little. I do not, so saying, at all take 

 sides with those who will tell us that fish are colour blind, 

 nor those who say that their vision is greatly different from 

 ours, but I do say that since the colour of the fly, as seen from 

 below, is almost entirely a matter of reflection of the colour 

 of the river's bottom, it can signify very little what colour 

 of its own we give it. It will appear to the fish either as a 

 dull silhouette or with the reflected colour of the river's 



