98 SALMONIA. [FOURTH DAY. 



POIET. The explanation that you have just been 

 giving us of the effects of playing fish, I confess 

 alarms me, and makes me more afraid than I was 

 before, that we are pursuing a very cruel amusement ; 

 for death by strangulation, I conceive, must be very 

 laborious, slow, and painful. 



PHYS. I think as I did before I was an angler, 

 as to the merciless character of field-sports ; but I 

 doubt if this part of the process of the fly-fisher 

 ought so strongly to alarm your feelings. As far as 

 analogies from warm-blooded animals can apply to 

 the case, the death that follows obstructed respiration 

 is quick, and preceded by insensibility. There are 

 many instances of persons who have recovered from 

 the apparent death produced by drowning, and had 

 no recollection of any violent or intense agony ; 

 indeed, the alarm or passion of fear generally absorbs 

 all the sensibility, and the physical suffering is lost in 

 the mental agitation. I can answer from my own 

 experience, that there is no pain which precedes the 

 insensibility occasioned by breathing gases unfitted 

 for supporting life, but oftener a pleasurable feeling, 

 as in the case of the respiration of nitrous oxide. 

 And in the suffocation produced by the gradual 

 abstraction of air in a close room where charcoal is 

 burning, we have the record of the son of a celebrated 

 chemist, that the sensation which precedes the deep 



