y. 



THE TROUT JUMP. 



POOR little May-flies on the pools of Yenlake, you 

 have at best but a hard life of it ! Though your wings 

 are fairy-like and light as gauze, though the sunshine 

 plays upon your dancing bodies with opalescent hues, 

 though you spend your time merrily enough to all seem- 

 ing in flitting and flirting by the cool rivulet, yet is your 

 appointed span but twenty-four hours long, and even for 

 that short space your courtship and your maternity is 

 environed with manifold dangers and endless foes. You 

 pass your days between the Scylla of sunshine and the 

 Charybdis of cloudy skies. "When the sun shone yester- 

 day, you were devoured in the midst of your love-mak- 

 ing by the gay swallows ; when the clouds cover the 

 heaven to-day, 1 see the trout are leaping to engulf you 

 as you try in vain to lay your eggs in peace and quiet on 

 the calm surface of the water. The fish can see you 

 quite enough against the background canopy of cloud, 

 and there is nothing they love better for their morning 

 meal than a good fat mother May-fly. 



I wonder very much what thoughts pass through the 

 heads of these jumping trout as they gaze up eagerly tow- 

 ard the vast white sheet above them, just dappled here 

 and there by the little spot of darkness that forms to 

 them the visible symbol of an eatable insect. One of 

 the great dangers, indeed, which surround the path of 

 scientific psychology is that of being too exclusively 

 human. Here more than anywhere else in science the 



