THE LARVA OR SPIDER THEORY. 205 



perience, and that is not short or little, I never remember 

 but once or twice to have seen this caterpillar drifting on 

 the water, and then why then I threw it there myself to 

 experimentalise. 



As regards the taste of a chub for them, all that can be 



said is, that there is no small animal or large insect of any 



kind, or imitation thereof, which you can throw to him 



which he will not seize and devour with avidity ; and I 



equally believe that there is nothing that can be dressed 



with fur and feathers in the shape of insect or fly which 



some trout or other will not be rash enough to dash at, 



at times. What is more common than for a trout to lay 



hold of a salmon fly half as big as himself? What does ho 



mistake that for ? For the tiger-moth itself, possibly, 



upon which he is so in the habit of feeding. Granting 



even the palmer theory, can the trout mistake the small 



insect dressed with some three turns of a red hackle and 



half a strand of herl for a huge h'airy caterpillar of more 



than a dozen times its size ? Is this reasonable, or is it 



not simple nonsense ? Then, it is often called the cocli- 



y-bondu, when dressed with a hackle with a black centre. 



Now, if this really be meant for an imitation of the coch- 



y-bondu, it is a very bad one. The coch-y-bondu, which 



is identical with the bracken clock, the Marlow buzz, the 



shorn fly, the fern webb, &c., &c., is not a fly or palmer, 



but a winged beetle, like unto a very small cockchafer, 



and which makes its appearance in some localities (for it 



is very local, abounding sometimes 011 one or two miles of 



a river and absent from the next one or two) in the balmy 



airs of June. Yet we use this fly even in February, and 



it takes. We use it, moreover, as the coch-y-bondu on 



rivers where the natural insect is never seen, and still it 



takes well at times. It is more than probable that the 



fish mistake it either for a water-spider or the larva of 



