58 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. [PART I. 



confess my discourse is like to prove suitable to my re- 

 creation, calm and quiet ; we seldom take the name of God 

 into our mouths, but it is either to praise him, or to pray to 

 him ; if others use it vainly in the midst of their recreations, 

 so vainly as if they meant to conjure, I must tell you, it is 

 neither our fault or our custom ; we protest against it. But, 

 pray remember I accuse nobody; for as I would not make a 

 watery discourse, so I would not put too much vinegar into 

 it ; nor would I raise the reputation of my own art, by the 

 diminution or ruin of another's. And so much for the 

 prologue to what I mean to say. 



And now for the water, the element that I trade in. The 

 water is the eldest daughter of the creation, the element 

 upon which the Spirit of Grod did first move, the element 

 which Grod commanded to bring forth living creatures abun- 

 dantly ; and without which, those that inhabit the land, even 

 all creatures that have breath in their nostrils, must sud- 

 denly return to putrefaction. Moses, the great lawgiver 

 and chief philosopher, skilled in all the learning of the 

 Egyptians, who was called the friend of Grod, and knew the 

 mind of the Almighty, names this element the first in the 

 creation : this is the element upon which the Spirit of Grod 

 did first move, and is the chief ingredient in the creation ; 

 many philosophers have made it to comprehend all the other 

 elements, and most allow it the chiefest in the mixtionof all 

 living creatures. 1 



There be that profess to believe that all bodies are made 

 of water, and may be reduced back again to water only : they 

 endeavour to demonstrate it thus : 



Take a willow, or any like speedy-growing plant, newly 

 rooted in a box or barrel full of earth, weigh them altogether 

 exactly when the trees begin to grow, and then weigh them 

 altogether after the tree is increased from its first rooting, 

 to weigh an hundred pound weight more than when it was 

 first rooted and weighed ; and you shall find this augment of 



1 Thales, of Miletus (540 B. C.), one of the seven wise men of Greece, 

 like Homer, regarded water as the primary element, the passive principle 

 on which an intelligent Cause moved to form all things. By water he 

 meant Chaos. Cicero, ' 'De Nat. Deorum," i. 10 ; Aristotle, "Metaphysica," 

 i., 8. So Pindar : "Best of all things is water." See Olymp. i., 

 first line. 



