74 AMERICAN ANGLER'S BOOK 



old East India merchant ; it may have caused the introduc 

 tion of the " bow-dips j" in Philadelphia. This is a piece of 

 whalebone bent at right angles, each side or arm being fifteen 

 to eighteen inches in length, with a snood attached to the 

 ends. It is lowered to the bottom by means of a hand-line, 

 and a conical leaden sinker fastened ten or twelve inches 

 beneath the angle^ It is well adapted for taking small fish 

 in any rapid tideway (especially White Perch), where they 

 collect in schools and bite rapidly. It is braced by lateral 

 pieces of cord, which cause the whalebone to give and resume 

 its position as the fi^h takes the bait — ^making it almost sure 

 to hook him. I have heard of forty dozen White Perch 

 being taken in the Delaware by three fishermen, in the last 

 two hours of an ebb-tide, with this strange-looking con- 

 trivance. 



The tackle used exclusiTely in fly-fishing, I will mentioB 

 under its appropriate head, in a subsequent article. 



There is a great deal of superfluous tackle pictured and 

 described in English books on angling. There is the clearing 

 ring, the angler'^s friend (a curved blade sharpened on the 

 inner edge), baiting-needle, disgorger, paternoster, kill-devil, 

 a plummet to get the depth of water, &c., &c., which would 

 better grace the window of a tackle shop, or a museum 

 of useless tackle, than an angler's wallet. It is amusing and 

 even wonderful, what an amount of such stuff an ardent, green 

 angler, with a flush pocket, can collect. As he grows older 

 in the art, of course he throws it away, or imposes it as a 

 present on some one no less verdant than he was himself a 

 few summers before, exclaiming with that ancient philoso- 

 pher : " Lord, how many things there are in this world of 

 which Diogenes hath no need !" 



