AMERICAN TROUT-STREAM INSECTS 



climatic conditions in future seasons. I fully re- 

 alize it to be a bold assertion to infer, even, that 

 everybody is using indifferent flies. Yet, again I 

 repeat, if we copy nature, we must be right. The 

 very reason why I undertake a most difficult work 

 is to induce anglers to turn back to nature, to fact 

 instead of fiction, to the living insect instead of the 

 fancy fly. Had my own tied flies not been suc- 

 cessful in rising trout up to my usual average I 

 should be content to drop further effort and ac- 

 cept present conditions in the use of commercial 

 flies now on the market. 



On the other hand, I am more than ever con- 

 vinced that in the last decade there has been a retro- 

 grade, or backward movement instead of forward, 

 in the making of flies alluring to trout. In all the 

 best one hundred artificial flies pictured in Mr. Hal- 

 ford's book, not a single one of them even faintly 

 imitates any insect found on American streams. 

 He frankly states that many of them are fancy flies, 

 not intended to be copies from nature. 



The most notable fact concerning the insects of 

 July is the extraordinary abundance and variety 

 of very small specimens of all three kinds, duns, 

 drakes, and spinners. Sometimes the surface is 

 alive with a moving mass of very small insects; 

 then, in places, clouds of tiny mosquito-like insects 

 are just as thick. They are, of course, no service 



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