232 PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH. 



Others'again recommend the working up with it of a certain 

 quantity of cotton wool to make it adhere longer to the hook. 

 Honey is another addition which is often strongly advocated. 

 I cannot say, however, that I have personally found any 

 necessity for or advantage in these various refinements, and I 

 am disposed to think that a good clean white bread paste made 

 in the way that I have described will generally take, when fish 

 are taking at all, at least as well as any other variation. 



A sort of composite bait which has been recommended 

 on really good authority is made by putting a gentle on the 

 point of the hook and covering the rest of the shank with 

 paste. Mr. Davies, the accomplished author of a charming 

 book on ' Fishing in the Norfolk Broads,' states that in his 

 experience a paste and gentle bait thus concocted has been 

 known to kill where no success attended the use of paste 

 alone. 



Cheese paste i.e. 01 dinar/ cheese worked up into a paste 

 is also a bait which has been recommended as deadly for 

 carp and barbel. That it is so for chub used with a float 

 in the ' Nottingham style,' under boughs, c., and in pellets 

 about the size of a cherry 1 can confidently assert, but I have 

 not tried it myself for any other fish. The cheese I have used 

 has also been always compaiativeiy new, whereas to select a 

 cheese that 'stinks' is the advice of experts. 



There is, in fact, no end to the nostrums with which writers 

 on fishing would complicate our bait-box. They almost all, 

 however, depend, as pointed out in an amusing article by 'G. F ,' 

 published in the 'Fisherman's Magazine,' some years ago, upon 

 tittivating the olfactory fisn nerves, and this again depends upon 

 fish being possessed of the sense of smell, which may be assumed 

 by analogy, but I doivt think has ever been demonstrated ichthyo- 

 logically. Admitting, however, that in fish as in man, the nose 

 may be ' the sentinel of the stomach,' it is hard to believe that it 

 could receive with pleasure such a compound as the following, 

 recommended by M. Charras to Louis XIV., King of France, 

 as an infallible ' anointment for fish bait ; 



