SENSES OF TROUT. 15 



angler can make, is there the least danger of 

 alarming them. They have frequently been caught 

 below a railway bridge at the very time a train was 

 passing overhead. 



Those who object to fishing on the ground of 

 its cruelty have got into nice disquisitions upon 

 the subject of trouts' feelings. Having already 

 referred our readers to Izaak Walton and a learned 

 Doctor of Divinity for the solution of this diffi- 

 culty, we need not do more than remark that 

 their feelings do not seem to be by any means 

 acute. They have frequently been caught with 

 flies in their mouths which had been left there by 

 some angler a few hours previous. The trout, as 

 Professor Wilson observed, having gone off, " with 

 a fly in one cheek and his tongue in the other." 

 A friend of ours met with a remarkable instance 

 of this want of feeling when angling in the Whit- 

 adder with worm. He had just made his first 

 cast when a trout went off with the whole 

 apparatus of hook and casting-line. Without 

 moving from where he stood, in the middle of 

 the water, he put on another, and first cast with 

 it caught the trout with the previous casting-line 

 hanging from its mouth, and the hook firmly 

 fixed in it. The vagaries which they exhibit 

 when hooked are usually attributed to pain, but 

 more probably arise from a mixed feeling of sur- 

 prise and just indignation at having their powers 

 of locomotion suddenly curtailed 



