30 AN ANGLER'S BASKET. 



kind of house, and Nature, with her usual liberality, has 

 prepared surprises for those who care to look, even in these 

 lowly insects. Here is one solidly constructed of bits of 

 hard gravel, rough rock and shining sand, but within as 

 smooth, and no doubt as easy to wear, as an old shoe ; here 

 is another, in which two or three long chips of weed form 

 the strengthening props of the abode ; and here another one 

 (such as a number of us examined through a powerful 

 magnifier on the noisy beck behind the hamlet of Howietown 

 by Ullswater) ; it is composed of tiny atoms of coloured 

 stone and spar, blue, amber, pink, green, red, and brown set 

 side by side in a truly wonderful way like Mosaic work, and 

 held together by a thin transparent groundwork ; held up to 

 the light it is as pretty as anything you can fancy. If you 

 will only take the trouble to look deeply into the surround- 

 ings of angling, you will find that every peep will teach you 

 something worth knowing and remembering. 



DO FISH FEEL PAIN? 



Do fish feel pain ? It is more than probable they do so 

 only to a very limited extent. It is clear, from what medical 

 men tell us, that the brain is the seat of the sensation of 

 pain, and that the more active and highly cultivated the 

 brain is, the more sensitive does it become to pain. This is 

 made abundantly clear in certain stages of inflammation of 

 the brain in man ; and granting that this is based upon 

 common observations of medical men, when we consider 

 that the proportion of brain in man is as i to 60, and in fish 

 as i to 3,000, it means, so far as we can judge, that the 

 sensibility to pain in fish is only -^th part that of man. We 

 can scarcely suppose that fish, or any of the lower orders of 

 creation, are altogether insusceptible to pain, but it is 

 more than probable that fear plays a larger part than 

 pain in producing the cries of some animals and the desperate 



